


for who would lose, though full of pain, this intellectual being

by angel_deux



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: AU, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, I cannot stress enough how pro-Anders this story is don't @ me, I'm just trying to help you know what you're getting into here, Like super AU, Pro-Anders, Pro-Mage, Rite of Tranquility, Romance, Tranquil Anders, anti-chantry, anti-templar, post-DAII through Tresspasser, pro-Cullen, though I give him a hard time about the templar stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-06
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-09 23:54:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 37,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11115543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: Not long after fleeing Kirkwall together, Anders and Hawke are separated. Anders is captured and made Tranquil, and is afterward handed over to Hawke by a sympathetic Cullen, who assumes she will kill him. Years later, when Hawke shows up to help the Inquisition with Anders still in tow, claiming that his continued presence is a penance for them both, Cullen finds himself in a better position to understand her. Which might be why he agrees to let Cassandra and the Inquisitor use Anders as a test subject when they discover a way to reverse the rite and restore the mind and magic of the man who sparked the rebellion.





	1. hail horrors, hail infernal world

**Author's Note:**

> Hi. I don't know what I'm doing, and am a lil scared, having never been a part of the Dragon Age fandom, but...here we go. 
> 
> I was looking through my old writing folders and came across a bunch of half-finished fics that I have now stitched, Frankenstein's Monster-esque, into a full story with a two-game-spanning plot. It's around 25k words right now, and it's been fairly heavily edited, so I should have the full thing up soon, but I wanted to get this first chapter up to try and prod myself into finishing the edit. 
> 
> I've never posted anything in this fandom in the years since I started playing the games, but I know that Anders and Cullen are sort of contradictory characters for a lot of people, and it seems like a genuine appreciation for both of them isn't a given. Which I totally understand, but...I love both characters, and that's reflected in this story. I'm sorry if that's not your jam, but it is most definitely my jam. That being said, Cullen does get a little beat up on in this story re: his mage views. I was apparently unsatisfied with the way they handled that in the game, because a lot of my half-finished Cullen/Trevelyan fics go deep into Cullen's opinions on mages. Just, as a warning if you're not into that, he does get Called Out a little bit. However, I love him, and this is very much a pro-Cullen story. 
> 
> Finally, there are no sexual consent issues regarding Tranquil Anders, but as I was re-reading the old bones of this story and shaping it, I started worrying about consent in general, so, just as a warning: it's mentioned several times that Anders specifically requested pre-Tranquility that he not be allowed to live as a Tranquil, and the whole story is predicated on Hawke ignoring that. Again, you don't have to worry about any uncomfortable sexual situations, but I don't want anyone to feel skeeved out without a heads-up. 
> 
> Uhh, I think that's it for my super long notes, if anyone's still reading this far. Please let me know if I've goofed anything in terms or lore or canon. It's been ages since I played DAII, and I wrote most of this story YEARS ago, so there might be some things I got wrong back in 2011 and just...never fixed.

A week has passed since they left Kirkwall, and Anders is certain that Marian hasn’t looked at him once.

Not really, not fully. Her eyes skate over him, checking him for injury, making sure he isn’t too tired to keep going. They narrow on him when he stumbles.  They dart away when he tries to catch them. When he opens his mouth to speak, he watches them shutter, watches them turn resolutely away, her full lips pressing into a thin line of disapproval.

“Don’t,” she will say. Or, impatient and exhausted, “Anders…” and he’ll close his mouth again.

She kissed him in the smoke and ash of Kirkwall, the Chantry explosion still roiling through the sky, and he tasted the tears on her face when she said that she loved him, that she would not kill him, that she still wanted him by her side.

But she had made a mistake, hadn’t she? Now, _years_ after having prodded him to make a move even though he warned her that it would only lead to this, she has realized that she should have listened to him all along.

Perhaps it has taken her the week to understand that the opportunity to put a knife in his back was one she should have taken.

He understands: she just doesn’t know what to do with him. It must have been loyalty that kept him alive in Kirkwall, and it’s dogging her still. Muscle memory and a remnant of feeling that keeps her from turning on him even though she knows she can’t live with what he’s done. Some misplaced love still clinging from back when they were new, when he could still smile without Justice snarling at him, when he could lounge in bed with his head in her lap and tell her stories of his daring escapes from the Circle. Back when he could be almost _himself_ again, because Marian’s presence made the overbearing rigidity of Justice just a little easier to control.

_I have earned a moment of rest_ , he would tell Justice, defiant, as if Justice were a Templar standing guard inside his head, denying him the right to be with his love. _Please, just a few more moments_. And for a little while, Justice had allowed it. They were happy.

They aren’t happy now. And with every aborted glance she sends his way, every terse refusal to allow him to speak, Anders becomes more and more convinced that they never will be again.

If she can’t make the decision, he will have to make it for her.

But just a few more days. Just a little while longer. He just wants to be near her for as long as he can. Maybe she will change her mind. Maybe she will…

He’s a fool to hope, but he keeps walking.

* * *

He builds up his courage slowly, over the course of several days. A week and three since they left Kirkwall, since they separated from their friends with the intention of scattering the Templars’ attention, and she’s found them a well-hidden cave in which to spend the night. She hardly ever speaks to him unless it’s necessary, and he doesn’t think he’s been allowed to say more than a word since they left their friends behind, but they communicate well enough without it. That’s what comes of three years of cohabitation. That’s what comes of years before that spent working together, watching each other’s backs. Anders gets a fire going, and Marian drops her haul from hunting onto the ground beside him. Without speaking, he begins to prepare it. Marian leaves the cave again, and he knows she’ll be laying out some traps outside, and she’ll scout the area to make sure that there’s no one following them.

There hasn’t been. Not for days. But still, she goes to check, and he knows that means she’s worried. He has noticed the growing darkness under her eyes, the way it matches the growing darkness under his, and he knows that neither of them have been sleeping.

The fear keeps him awake more than the guilt of thinking of the people he killed. He can’t help but hear Templars in every cracking twig, every distant sound. Bad enough that so many relative innocents died for the cause. It was necessary. They were complicit. Something had to be done. Justice had to be served. But _her_? If the Templars catch up to them, if they cast her aside and kill her in their pursuit of him, he won’t survive it.

She lies awake at night too, apparently, still with him like it’s where she wants to be, even though she can’t bear to have him any closer than several feet away, and he wonders why she’s still here. She won’t look at him, but she won’t leave him either. Later, she will curl up in her bedroll, shivering, on the other side of the cave, and he will try to sleep alone, and he will think of how much easier it would have been for her if only she had killed him.

He thinks, too, of the way she used to curl up behind him, the way she would wrap her arm around his middle, nuzzle her face into the hair at the back of his neck. The way she would tuck her head under his chin sometimes, bury herself in his arms when she needed to, even though she usually liked to be the one doing the holding. Maker, it would almost be easy to survive this if she would let him hold her again.

He thought, when they first ran, when she cupped his face and said that she would follow him anywhere, that it would be _romantic_. They would be hunted, but at least they would have each other. What kind of foolish hope was that? He sees now that this is the only way it was ever going to happen: she regrets him. She regrets ever speaking to him, ever helping him, ever loving him.

The courage comes surging, unexpectedly, when she walks back in, and he says (quickly, before she can tell him to stop), “the food’s ready, love.”

His heart thumps in his chest as if he has confronted her. As if he has asked the question he wants to ask ( _why did you do this if you can’t even look at me_?) or as if he has said the words he wants to say ( _you should have killed me. You still could. Please_ ).

And he was right to fear, because the tense line of her body goes even more rigid. She stalks over, rips the offered food from his hands, and she sits across the fire from him, not looking.

“Don’t,” she starts, but she hesitates, softer suddenly, for just a moment. Her eyes flicker up to meet his, and he nearly sobs with relief that she’s _looking_ at him, even if it’s only for a second before they go back down again, denying him. “Don’t call me that.”

There are a few moments of almost dizzy blankness after she speaks. And then it’s _hurt_. A painful denial, followed by an even more painful acceptance. It feels as if he has been hollowed out from the inside. As if Justice wasn’t the only spirit that had made a home in him, as if Love was a thing that possessed you and then could _leave_ , having you realizing only when it was too late that it was something that you needed to survive. He exhales as if he has been punched in slow-motion, the sound shaky and oddly violent, and it echoes loud over the crackling of the fire.

“Why won’t you just kill me?” he finally asks, his voice much more tremulous aloud than the defiance it sounded like in his head, and she tears a piece off her food as if _it_ blew up the Chantry and ruined her life. “Or if…if you can’t, then just go back to Kirkwall. Leave me here. Don’t do this to yourself.”

“You think I can go _back_?” Marian laughs, horribly, her mouth twisted into a sneer that would speak of hate except that there are tears in her eyes, and he understands. He knows that she doesn’t hate him. In some awful way, she still loves him. She just can’t remember why, can’t remember why she didn’t kill him, and it’s _killing_ her, and this might be worse than anything Anders has ever felt. He was prepared to suffer the consequences of doing what needed to be done, but he’s not sure he would have done it if he had known what it would do to _her._

Justice rumbles with disgust at the back of his mind. This is why the spirit has always disapproved of Anders’ love for her.

“Of course you can go back, lo…Marian. Varric and Aveline. Bethany. Merrill. Isabela. You have so many people who love you. They would all help you without question. And if you killed me, even if you just told them you did, Fenris and Sebastian would…”

“Shut up.”

“I’m only trying to…”

“I said stop _talking_!”

“ _Why_? So you can go back to dragging me through the forest, refusing to look at me, making yourself miserable for me? This is pointless! Just end it, one way or the other! I can’t just sit here and let you suffer like this. Not for me. It isn’t _just_.”

The violence of her next movement, of the way she casts aside the food and looms over him, the way she shoves him with both hands, palms against his chest, is shocking. Even if he wanted to stop her, he couldn’t, and he doesn’t, and he falls off the log he’s been perched on, landing hard on his back. There’s a part of him that’s eager for this. Thinking: _finally_. She’s going to make it right. She’s going to do what she should have done when he was sitting in front of her beneath the flames of the Chantry, ready for the knife. She’ll slit his throat like she’s done to so many others before him, and she will free him. She will free Justice. She will free herself.

But she doesn’t take another step towards him. Even to do _this_ , even to deliver justice, she can’t let herself get close to him. He’s sprawled on his back, hands up, reflexively defensive even though this is what he wants, and her chest heaves as she looks down at him. The rage was quick to rise, and it’s slower to settle, but it’s leaving her in increments, leaving her looking devastated again, and he scrambles back, tries to get to his feet. He’s exhausted, and the ground sways beneath him like they’re on Isabela’s ship, and he staggers forward. Marian takes a step back.

It hurts him, unexpectedly, to see the automatic move away from him, and so he reaches out for her. He isn’t even really sure why. He should anticipate what happens next: she flinches back when his fingers brush her jaw, as if he is some monster, as if she thinks he means to hurt her, and his heart stutters in his chest.

“Marian,” he begs, a sob more than a word, and she flinches back further, fingers curled into fists. She’s moving toward the mouth of the cave already.

“Don’t touch me,” she says, and her words are thick with tears as well. “Don’t _touch_ me, Anders!”

The curse of it is that he can remember a thousand times she’s said his name before. Soft, sweet, kind, wanting, _needing_. And now it’s spat like a damnation, and all he can think is: _you knew it was too late_.

She’s gone from the cave before he can say anything else, and he thinks it’s dramatic but narratively fitting that his last word to her was a sobbing exhalation of her name. And the last thing he heard from her was loathing. Varric would have appreciated that, probably.

* * *

He leaves a note against his better judgement. He doesn’t want her to linger here, thinking he’ll come back.

_Go back to Kirkwall_ , he writes. _I shouldn’t have asked you to kill me. That was unfair. I shouldn’t have put you in that position. But I cannot stay. I can’t allow you to suffer for me any longer. I know where this was headed, and I truly do understand why you can no longer care for me. But you wouldn’t be you if you didn’t try to help every lost soul who needs it, so I’m taking that issue out of your hands, as I should have done back in Kirkwall._

_I’m so sorry that I’ve done this to you. I should never have allowed you to run with me. But it isn’t too late, no matter what you think. Your friends love you. They’ll shelter you, I promise. Tell them you killed me, that you came to your senses. The Templars will parade you through the streets as a hero._

_It may not mean much, and I doubt if you’ll trust me even now, but I want you to know that I have always loved you. Not one second of that was false, or a plot, whatever you think. You have been the best thing in the whole of my life, and I wish I had never met you, love._

He crosses out _love_ , at the end. Scribbles it out until she won’t be able to see what was there.

_Don’t call me that_ , she had said, and he hates himself.

It doesn’t escape him that _he’s_ leaving her, too. Her parents, Carver, all taken from her. Bethany locked away in the Circle. For so long it was just the two of them in that big house, and maybe _that’s_ why she couldn’t kill him. He is her family, no matter what he’s done. But he knows she’ll be better for this. She’ll go back to her friends. Back to the city she spent so much time trying to save from itself.

Maybe, eventually, she will be able to look back on him with fondness. Maybe she will be able to love the memory of him, the way she used to love the man. She can look back and think that when it counted, he did what was right, and he did it for _her_.

He folds the note and leaves it on her bedroll. He leaves all of his supplies, save for the staff she bought him in Hightown. She can decide what she wants to take with her and what she wants to leave to rot. He heads for the mouth of the cave and looks around quickly to make sure that she isn’t nearby.

And then he pulls up his hood, and he goes.

* * *

He doesn’t make it very far. The Templars _were_ chasing them, after all.

Justice is oddly quiet when Anders doesn’t try to fight. But perhaps that makes sense: it is Just, after all, that he’ll now pay for what he did (what _they_ did), even if it means an end. And Justice will be free, after all.

_Goodbye, my friend_ , he thinks, and he feels the rumbling hum of agreement from the spirit in his head.

He was expecting Silencing and swords, but they force him to his knees instead, and he understands.

There was a time when the brand was his biggest fear. It’s a sign to him of how deeply broken he has become that he hardly even struggles when he sees it.


	2. forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a slight warning for this chapter: there's some brief discussion of suicide and also a lot of thinking about mercy-killing. Also Tranquility, which yes, is the entire plot of this story, but needs a warning because it's super fucked up imo

Marian searches for five days before she heads back to Kirkwall. Five frantic days, shouting his name in the woods, following every trail and set of footprints she can find. There are hundreds of refugees from Kirkwall fleeing the city, and she questions everyone she sees. Most of them know her face, have been helped by her in her tenure as Champion. Most of them have been healed by Anders before. They try to return the favor, most of them apparently not having heard yet or perhaps not really caring that the kindhearted healer and the abomination who blew up the Chantry were one and the same, but none of them have seen him.

She searches the underbrush where it grows thickly. She peers down every gully, every ravine she sees, hoping with her heart in her throat that she won’t see the black feathered coat. Hoping that she won’t find his body.

She doesn’t find _anything_. It’s as if he has completely vanished.

For the first few nights, she stays in the cave where he left her, as if she thinks he might change his mind and come back, and she reads that damned note a hundred times. Trying to decipher it as if she thinks he has hidden some secret code in the too few lines of shaky, heartbroken script.

_Maker_ , she thinks, _what have I done?_

Has he continued on without her? Running away to someplace the Templars might not recognize him? Or has he done something rash and horrible? She can imagine it too easily: Anders, kneeling in a clearing, raising his staff high, immolating himself. Or leaping into the ocean, letting his heavy coat and the whirling tide of the sea drag him down.

He had begged her, tried to touch her, and she wouldn’t let him.

Maker, when was the last time she let him?

She remembers the night before the explosion. He hadn’t been home in a week, maybe more, and she had actually been startled to see him standing in the doorway to their bedroom. Her inclination was to make a joke, to be as sarcastic as she was known for, but he had looked so tired. So lost. He had allowed her to pull him into bed, and she could tell that he was struggling with Justice. The spirit hadn’t wanted him there, had wanted him away from her, but Anders was fighting it. It had been getting worse: Justice hardly allowed Anders time to eat, to sleep, before it was dragging him off to another corner of Kirkwall to help the mages. Justice was killing him, and Marian didn’t know what to do, and so for that final night she just _held_ him. Rested his head on her chest and wrapped her arms around him and tucked the blankets around them both. She stroked his hair and talked to him. He hardly spoke at all, said probably no more than a handful of words the entire night, but there was something so achingly _grateful_ in his expression as he listened. As if she had hit on exactly what he needed.

In hindsight, it’s clear that all he wanted was to be with her on what he thought would be their last night together. She resents him for it, for not telling her, for scaring her with his distance and his vague promises of future suffering. What he did to the Chantry will take time to process, but even in the horrifying first moments after the explosion, she _understood_ it. Using her the way he had, making her complicit without her consent, not trusting her to help him when she had done nothing but support him for _years_ , those were the things that still burned a week after leaving Kirkwall.

But now, now that she’s read his note, now that he’s gone, she’s realizing that he was never leaving. He would never have left her if he didn’t think she wanted him to go.

Why hadn’t she held him in the week after Kirkwall? Why hadn’t she spoken to him? Told him, even, _I can’t deal with this right now, I can’t look at you right now, but give me time. I still love you. I always will._

Why hadn’t she tried to explain _what_ had made her so angry?

She had pushed and pushed, had shoved him back into a corner of himself when he already thought he deserved to die, and she had given him no hope that it wasn’t the end. What else was he supposed to think?

* * *

The Marian Hawke who returns to Kirkwall has never felt so far from being a Champion, but she’s greeted like one. Cheering and hugging and desperate thanks.

There’s a sinking feeling in her stomach even before she hears the first person in the crowd say _hunted_. Even before she hears the first person say _captured._

_You hunted him down like the dog he was_! One woman’s voice, thin and reedy above the rest, triumphant. _Thank the Maker!_

* * *

It’s Aveline she goes to, and it’s fitting that it’s her oldest friend whose expression breaks her heart the moment their eyes meet.

“Marian, I’m so sorry,” Aveline says, rising to her feet from behind her desk, piled impossibly high with lists and missives and maps. The days since the explosion have weighed heavy on her, from the look of the frown that drags down her face, but she’s as firm and unyielding as ever. She is the same woman who offered a kinder death to her husband when Marian first met her. The same woman who never wavered in her support, even as she disagreed with Marian’s chosen goals, with her association with Anders, with her choice to fight for the mages. Distantly, Marian knows that she came to Aveline first because Aveline won’t try to talk around it. Aveline will tell her what happened plainly.

It’s going to be hard enough. She doesn’t need to be coddled. She doesn’t _deserve_ to be coddled.

“Where is he?”

“They…they paraded him through the streets, at first. We put a stop to it once we realized what was happening, but…Marian, I was too late. Before I take you to him, you should know what they did to him.”

But Marian _already_ knows; if he had been executed, Aveline wouldn’t look so _sorry._

It would be easier to hear that he’s dead.

* * *

Cullen is nearly as difficult to bear, because he looks frightened of her when Aveline leads her into the office that used to belong to Meredith. In the past, Hawke has often found it easy to forget how young Cullen is. Humorless, dry, absurdly dedicated to his precious Templar order. How could a man like that be of an age with Bethany? And now he’s in charge of the fucking mess that Anders and Meredith and Orsino made of this city’s mages and Templars. By rights, he should seem older than ever.

Instead, he looks _younger._ He looks like a boy trying on his father’s set of armor, like a child playing pretend. The pressure of this cataclysm has worn on he and Aveline so differently, but it’s clear it’s worn them both down so _much._ Cullen scrambles out of the chair behind the too-big desk that Meredith left behind, already stammering. His practiced disdain is banished, at least for now. She must look as desperate as she feels, to have inspired so much genuine fear in a man who has always seemed so unflappable.

“Where is he?” she asks, her voice crackling with energy.

“He’s…he’s in the library,” Cullen says. “We thought…we couldn’t execute him until you knew. Give you a chance to say goodbye.”

  _We?_ she almost asks, but then she catches the way Cullen’s eyes flit briefly to Aveline’s, and of _course_ Aveline would have argued for keeping Anders alive until Hawke could be located.

“We told everyone that _you_ caught him,” Aveline says. Marian understands that that was meant as a kindness, but it makes her sick to think of all of Kirkwall believing she would turn in the man she loved, the man she sheltered for years, the man she _lived_ with, to allow him to be tortured by Templars with every mage’s worst fear. She would have burned the rest of this city to the ground to save him, and the absurdity of the lie that Aveline told twists inside her. “We knew that if you were alive, you’d be back once you’d heard, and the city’s already falling apart. Knowing about a group of rogue Templars delivering justice where they see fit…it wouldn’t help. And this way, you…you have options. The city is reeling. Grieving. They never would have allowed you here otherwise.”

“All those _people_ ,” Cullen says quietly, and the fact that he’s trying to defend the monsters that did this to _her Anders_ makes Marian see stars for a moment before the Templar quickly adds, “the men have been punished, of course. They have been publically decried. There’s been a lot of that. Trying to keep order. Making sure both sides are treated as fairly as possible. What they did obviously does not fall under that directive. We need to make sure that the city sees...well. I don’t suppose you care about all that.”

“No. I really don’t,” Marian answers.

“It’s no less than he deserved, no matter what Chantry law requires,” Cullen says. The pride, defiance, has come back from out of nowhere, and Marian has never wanted to hit the man so badly. He has always reminded her a little of Carver. Playing at authority despite the more than five years she has on him, certainty warped by trauma and making him someone harsher than he should be, for his age. If he _was_ Carver, she probably _would_ have hit him. “But for what it’s worth, for the respect I have always had for you, I never would have…”

“I know,” Marian replies, even though part of her thinks that Cullen’s promise sounds like a set of pretty words that are nowhere close to the truth. Maybe he wants to believe that he never would have put Anders to the brand. That he never would have reacted emotionally upon finding him defenseless and broken in the woods, despite the rage that keeps the young Templar rigid even now. If she was feeling just a little less devastated, maybe she would point it out for the hypocrisy that it is, considering Cullen waited until the eleventh hour to protest Meredith’s abuses. Considering all the already-Harrowed mages made Tranquil in the years since Cullen became second-in-command. Anders’ voice rages inside her head, a reminder of what she’s lost, a reminder of why he thought he had to do something to get the attention of the people who would rather pretend nothing was wrong in Kirkwall at all. She doesn’t repeat any of the thoughts that flit through her mind. She just wants him to stop _talking_. “I’m taking him. You’re giving him over to me, and I’m taking him out of the city.”

“Marian,” Aveline says, slowly, like she thinks Marian doesn’t understand what has happened to Anders after all, and Marian arches an eyebrow at her. Aveline is her oldest friend, but this isn’t something she’s willing to compromise on, and she hopes for both of their sakes that the older woman recognizes that.

“I’m taking him whether you allow me to or not.” She turns back to look at Cullen, who looks so annoyingly _sad_ for her. “I’ll carve through your Templars. You know I will. Protect your people from further harm and give me Anders. Allow me to decide for myself where to take the man I love to end his suffering. After all I’ve done for this city, at the very least you can give me _that_.”

Cullen hesitates, glances at Aveline, and eventually nods.

Thankfully, neither of them feel the need to remind her that Anders _isn’t_ suffering. Not anymore. That that’s the whole point.

* * *

He’s not wearing his black coat in the library, and she’s almost glad, because it separates this hollow shell from the man who loved that feathered mess. He’s wearing just a plain shirt, breeches, something he might have worn at home when he was feeling particularly lazy, back in the beginning, when laziness was possible, when Justice hadn’t been quite so demanding. He is writing notes in an even, unhurried hand. Nothing like the frantic pace when he was writing his manifesto in the latest months, that horrifying, fevered need to get everything written down. No, everything about him is different from the man she’s already grieving, and it breaks Marian’s heart almost as much as the manifesto writing did.

“Anders,” she says, and he looks up, expression blank. Her fingers curl into fists when she sees the brand, the sunburst on his forehead. _Marked as property of the fucking Chantry_ , he had sneered once, in a rage over unexpectedly running into a Tranquil in the marketplace.

“Serrah Hawke,” he says. The monotone of the Tranquil has unsettled her enough when she’s heard them speak in the past, but it’s _Anders_. It’s her Anders, and it’s too much. He should have smiled sadly, said, _hello, love_. Should have flinched away from her, even, expecting more cruelty from her. Not this. Not this horrible, placid calm. If she wasn’t standing in the middle of a nest of Templars, she would not be able to handle this. She would break down. She would beg for forgiveness, even knowing that he no longer has the capacity to hate her for her indifference the way he should. She would do anything to let out this bubbling of resentment, of sorrow, of _fear_. Anders was the most passionate man she has ever known, and now he’s a nothing. An empty space in her heart and in her bed who cares nothing for anything. Who would never say something like _I would drown us in blood to keep you safe._

“Come on, Anders,” she says, her voice somehow steady. “We’re going.”

“Am I?” He looks to Cullen for permission, and it makes her sick.

“Yes, Anders,” Cullen says, and he can’t look at her any more than she can look at him. “You will go with her.”

“I have not finished with my notes.” It isn’t an argument from Anders, but a gentle reminder, and Marian sees that he’s writing down information on poultices. Healing. He’s writing down everything he knows about healing, because the Templars asked him to. Because they know he was the best spirit healer possibly in all of Thedas, and now they want to wring him dry of information before he’s completely gone.

There’s a bandage plastered above his eyebrow, another wrapped around his shoulder, under his shirt. They paraded him through the streets, she remembers. She wonders if it was the Templars or the grieving Kirkwall citizens who sought to hurt him, even though they would have known it was pointless. He can’t feel the shame of their words or the guilt of his actions. Not even physical pain would really bother him. Not enough for it to be satisfying to someone who wanted vengeance.

_Maker, what have I done?_

“You can finish your notes later,” she tells him. “We have to go.”

If he knows she’s lying to him, he doesn’t show it. Then again, he wouldn’t. He has been told to go with her, and so he will. He gets to his feet, still too thin, still wavering with exhaustion, but he doesn’t complain. He won’t. The days of thinking him whining, needy, too-dedicated to his cause are over.

As she leads him out into the hallway, as she covers him with a cloak, as she takes him out of the city on foot with his hood pulled low so no one will recognize him, she feels a low roil in her gut to realize that it’s not so different from how it was when they were on the run for that week together. Anders is pliant, silent. He follows her every direction. Except there’s no more fear in his eyes. No more reproach. No more anguish, silently begging her to look at him.

If she never looked into his eyes again, he wouldn’t mind.

He’s not Anders anymore, and it’s her fault, and she needs to make it right.

* * *

She has to kill him. She knows that’s what he would want if he was still capable of wanting anything at all.

_If they ever take me_ , he said once, curled around her, near sleep, _if they make me Tranquil, I want you to kill me. You saw Karl. You saw how he…how it takes the love from you and makes you do whatever they want you to do. No more fighting. It took the love Karl had for me, and it will take the love I have for you, and I can’t bear the thought of that. I’d look at you like a stranger. If they asked me to betray you, I would, without a thought. Sweetheart, promise me you’ll kill me._

She _had_ promised. In those early twilight days, she would have promised him anything.

Before she left, Cullen had said, _if it helps you at all to hear this, the men said he hardly put up a fight. He wasn’t…in pain._

No, he _was_ in pain, and it doesn’t help. Because the pain was of her own making. She did this to him. She drove him closer and closer to the edge, and she pushed him off it, and he thought he had nothing left. He didn’t fight because Tranquility is a kind of death, and because in that moment he’d probably thought it didn’t matter how it happened. Just as long as it was over.

They walk for a while. They cross the sea, into Ferelden. Two weeks turns into three, until she finds a cliffside high above the ocean. It’s lovely here, and if Anders could still appreciate things, he would probably appreciate this. He has been good, these past three weeks, because he has no other choice. He does not complain or ask questions. He understands from her fits of crying and the trouble she has speaking to him that his presence upsets her, and he continues to try and apologize for it, even though she tells him every time that it is not his fault.

Tranquil cannot consent to anything, cannot truly give their opinions on what they want to do or where they want to go, but she tries to base her actions on what Anders would have wanted, if he were still whole, and she thinks he would have liked it here. He would have lain with his head in her lap, would have closed his eyes and breathed in the salt air.

“Look out at the ocean,” she tells him, and he does. “Put down your bag. Are you tired?”

“No.”

“Do you want to sit?”

“Sitting would be fine.”

If she had asked him if he wanted to stand, he probably would have said _standing would be fine_ , but she thinks Anders would have liked to lounge a while.

“Sit, then,” she says, softly. She can’t help adding, “if you want.”

He sits, and she sits beside him, and when she watches him in profile like this, the sunset golden, warming his skin, his placid expression seeming almost a true smile, she can nearly see _Anders_ again, and she’s crying before she can stop herself. Not the constant leaking tears of the past few weeks, the stifled whimpers of nights huddled into herself, with several feet of space between them, with Anders breathing quietly and her trying to shove her grief back into the guilt-shaped box it belongs in. No, these are great, gulping sobs. He turns to look at her.

“I apologize if my presence causes you distress,” he tells her for the thirty-seventh time since they left Kirkwall, not sounding sorry at all.

“It’s not your fault,” she tells him. “It’s mine. Watch the waves, okay, Anders? You would have liked it.”

“You are right,” he says, noncommittal. “It is peaceful here.” She wonders if Tranquil are capable of saying things just to be polite. She should have learned more about them when she had the chance. She draws her knees up to her chest, finger trailing over the dagger in the sheath at her hip as she watches him. She wonders what Anders would do now, if he had a moment in which to be himself again. He would be grateful, she thinks, that she brought him somewhere nice for this. He would probably tell her that she shouldn’t have made the fuss, the way he always acted when she gave him a gift. Grateful but troubled by the fact that she cared so much. “May I ask a question, Marian?”

At least he’s not calling her _Serrah Hawke_ anymore.

“You can ask questions whenever you like,” she reminds him.

“It may cause you further distress.”

“Thank you for the warning, but it’s not like it’ll hurt worse than anything else,” she points out with a teary laugh.

Anders would have smiled at that, probably. The corner of his mouth lifting just a bit. Even when he was at his most tortured and sad and unreachable, her sarcastic tone drew something mirthful from him. Like the Anders from before Justice, the irreverent man she never had the pleasure of meeting, was peeking through.

This Anders doesn’t smile. If anything, he looks vaguely puzzled, but that might just be the light casting shadows on his face, making his blankness look like _something._

“I will ask, then. Are you going to kill me?”

She doesn’t have to ask why he would think that. She understands so little about Tranquility, not being a mage herself, but she knows enough from his past expressions of his biggest fear, from Bethany’s occasional mentions of it. She knows that he still has his intelligence, his logical mind, his _memories_. He must remember talking about this a thousand times in the years they lived together, and in the years before in which they were friends. He must remember asking her to promise.

“I don’t know,” she tells him, endeavoring to be honest, to keep her tone even and soft, like his. “How would you…” she bites her cheek in frustration. _How would you feel about that_? Stupid question. He wouldn’t feel anything. “Would that be all right?”

He takes a moment to answer, still staring at the ocean.

“I do not see the point in it,” he decides. “I remember telling you I would not want to live like this, but it is not what I expected. It is peaceful. There is no more Justice making my thoughts difficult. And I could help you, if I was alive.”

“ _Help_ me?”

“I cannot heal the way I used to, but I know enough about it without the use of magic. I could be useful, if you were injured. And now that there is time, I could compile reports on spirit possession. I was always too busy, before. It is a sadly undocumented area of study.”

It’s not like he sounds _desperate_ , like he sounds as if he cares much either way, but there’s something unsettling in the way he speaks as if he is bargaining. Offering up reasons he should be allowed to live, but without any of the emotion she would expect to hear.

“Are you asking me not to kill you, Anders?” she asks, voice low, fingers twitching as she resists the engrained urge to comfort him, to reach out and tuck his hair behind his ear or press her lips to his temple.

He considers carefully.

“Yes,” he says, and she can breathe again.

“You know that if you were still Anders, you would have jumped off this cliff by now.”

“I am still Anders, but I understand why you do not think so.”

“Sometimes, Anders…” she starts, half-laughing, like she would have back when he was being frustrating, going on about his manifesto when she was trying to get laid, back when her greatest frustration was that Justice kept him on too tight a leash. But she sobers quickly. That’s been happening a lot. She feels like she’s unraveling. Like Anders being emotionless has made her adapt _his_ emotions as well as her own. “You’re incredibly frustrating, even as a Tranquil.”

“I apologize.”

“No you don’t.”

“I do.”

“There’s still no arguing with you,” Marian points out, laughing again, though the sound of it is nasally, false, stuffed up with tears. She hates this. Hates everything about it. She grips the dagger, but she thinks she knew from the moment she told him to ask questions whenever he likes that she isn’t going to kill him.

Maker, but she is a _coward_.

“Why would you want to help me?” she asks. “I _did_ this to you. I drove you away.”

“I told you: I am content like this. I have no reason not to help you. But if you require more evidence: you came back for me. And you have treated me well. I remember, too, the kind of person you are. I know that you are loyal, and that you will help people. I can assist you in doing that. That is a good purpose to have. I remember that I was going to die to save you, and that I believed you were worth the sacrifice. There are a lot of reasons to help you.”

It’s funny. In the weeks they’ve been traveling, she never once thought of asking him about this. Of asking him now that he can no longer hide his intentions what exactly he thought he was going to do when he left that cave. But he’s offered it to her, unprompted. She blinks back surprised tears.

“You said you were going to die to save me. Explain further,” she says, since that usually works better than _what_. Most of the time, when “what” is the question, Anders will repeat exactly what he just said, slightly louder. Sometimes it manages to be funny, manages to startle her into half a laugh, but she doesn’t think this will be one of those times.

“I remember thinking that it would be better if I were dead. You could return to Kirkwall and not be burdened by me. You could not decide to leave me on your own, though I deduced that you wanted to. I left you the note to explain.”

“Yes. I got the note. I hoped perhaps you had run off without me.”

“The note could have been clearer. If I wrote it now, I would make sure the intention was obvious.”

“Yeah. Course you would,” she sighs. She reaches out and puts her hand on the top of his head, automatic, the way she used to. Anders, like the cats he so adored, would push his head up into her palm, adjust his weight and settle against her shoulder, sigh away his burdens as she trailed her fingers through his hair. This Anders just sits, unmoving, under her touch.

“I am causing you distress again,” he guesses, still watching the waves.

“It’s not your fault. Anders, you said you remember that you were going to choose to die.”

“I do.”

“I’m going to ask you a question about how you used to feel. Is that something you can answer?”

“I cannot tell you until you ask me.”

“Maker, you’re the worst,” Marian says, surprised at the words, at the almost-mirth behind them. She’s been trying to figure out how to talk to this version of Anders as long as they’ve been traveling, she realizes. Was she ever going to kill him? Or did she know all along that she wasn’t going to be able to do it? “Do you remember if you loved me? You wrote in the note that you did. That you weren’t just using me because I could help you with your cause. Do you know if that was true? Did you love me?”

“Yes.” The answer is so quick that the question is hardly out of her mouth before it comes. She looks at him with surprise, but he’s still looking out at the ocean. Of course he is. She told him to. “I remember that I loved you. I remember that it was a cause of struggle with the spirit that possessed me. I remember thinking, _I will never deserve this woman. She is too good for me._ I cannot remember why I loved you, however.” She takes her hand away from him, then, because she needs to clamp it over her mouth to fight back the sudden sobs. Anders is unmoved. “Did that help you decide?”

“No,” she whispers. “Not really. But thank you for telling me.”

* * *

They sit there for hours, until the sun is gone, until Anders announces that he is hungry and needs to relieve himself.

She never takes the dagger from its sheath.

He makes stew for them both, that night.


	3. love refines the thoughts, and heart enlarges

 

She can tell exactly what Cullen’s thinking from the expression on his face.

It’s been several years since she saw him last, but at least he hasn’t changed _so_ much: he still doesn’t know how to temper his emotions. It used to be refined, barely hidden. Contempt or amusement or infatuation filtering through his rigid formality. Now, it’s open on his face. It’s something only slightly new, like the scar above his lip, and it makes him seem more human.

It also makes him seem _furious._

“Surprise,” she says, weaker than she would like.

“He’s not dead.”

Cullen is pointing behind her, to the small ring of tents in Skyhold’s courtyard, where she delivered Anders to help the Inquisition’s healers. She’s supposed to be lying low – at Varric’s somewhat desperate request – but she figured a few moments to show Anders to the healing tents couldn’t hurt. Except of _course_ the Inquisition’s Commander is fucking _Cullen_ , and of course he came barreling down from his tower the moment he spotted her.

“Sharp as ever, Knight-Captain,” she says.

“That’s not my title anymore,” Cullen replies, crossing his arms over his chest, looking tense as if he wants to say something brutally mean but resists the urge.

“That’s right. I’d _heard_ you left the Templars. For what it’s worth, that made me like you more than I ever have. Notwithstanding how close we were in Kirkwall.” Only half-joking, she gives him a wink to make sure he thinks it’s _all_ joke. Cullen, as ever, refuses to rise to the tone, but he can’t quite hide the stubborn flush that rises to his pale cheeks.

“Why isn’t he dead? Hawke, you know…”

“I’m not some monster, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she growls, defensive, hearing the disgust in his tone and knowing what he’s about to say. “I haven’t touched him. I wouldn’t. And I don’t need you telling me what you expected of me when you handed him over. I don’t need you telling me what he would _want_.”

“Why did you keep him alive?” Cullen asks. His disgust, distrust, unease hasn’t lessened even after her quick, definitive shutting down of whatever he thinks has transpired between she and Anders for the past few years. Is it strange to be relieved that he’s angry about this? Is it strange to be almost _proud_ of the man who once argued that mages were less than people? Maker, but her bar has lowered in the years since she left Kirkwall and started fighting for the mages. She has seen and heard too much of the kinds of horrors that are inflicted on mages, on Tranquil, on everyone. Even the slightest sign of kindness, and she’s ready to forget the things that frustrated her so deeply about Cullen back in Kirkwall.

His question, at least, is an easy one. She has asked it of herself often enough in the years since she stayed her hand, since she refused to kill Anders in that spot overlooking the ocean.  

“Penance,” she answers, and she doesn’t look away from Cullen’s eyes. “His _and_ mine.”

* * *

When it comes time for her to leave Skyhold to make contact with Stroud, Anders sees her off.

After years of living with Tranquil Anders, after years of traveling with him, she knows there’s enough of his old self left in him to be loyal to her. Out of habit, perhaps, or maybe because he remembers having loved her and trusts his previous judgement, or maybe because she treats him well and he knows that isn’t always guaranteed of people in his condition. So she isn’t all that surprised to find that he’s risen early to pack her things. She gives in to the weakness of believing that it means, in his own infallibly pragmatic way, that he cares about what happens to her.

Logic. That’s what matters to Tranquil. Logic and survival and knowledge. Sticking with her must strike some balance between all three, because he’s never given an indication that he would prefer to leave her, though she has offered him the choice often enough.

“You always forget something,” he tells her blandly as he hands her the pack he has put together for her, an un-asked-for explanation for his assistance.

Once upon a time, _she_ was the one saying those words to him. He never ate when he was supposed to, would forego sleep until he collapsed, Justice drowning out everything but _purpose_. Now, there’s nothing to distract him, and he’s always the one who remembers.

“Thank you,” she says, even though he wouldn’t mind if she didn’t.

Even several years into this absurd, masochistic arrangement, she’s always achingly careful in how she speaks to him. She knows she won’t make another mistake like the one that killed him; it’s impossible to. If she says something that would have driven the old him away, it won’t matter. If she left him in a cave after storming out, he would wait there for her. Without emotions clouding his perception, he understands much better than he used to: he would know that she just needed some time.

Still, she can’t bring herself to be anything other than unfailingly polite.

“You are welcome,” he says.

He doesn’t say that he’ll miss her, because he won’t. He prefers her company, she’s found, as much as he can. If she’s off on her own, wherever they’re staying, and he has nothing else to do, he will take his writings and look for her, settle down beside her and continue his work. She directed him to sleep in the accommodations for the Tranquil in the mage’s tower for the duration of their stay at Skyhold, though they usually sleep in separate cots in the same room (Cullen’s disgusted expression flashed through her mind and she wanted to make sure there was no room for doubt), but he always finds her in the morning to make sure she has eaten something, and sometimes she wakes in the middle of the night to find him writing at the desk in her room. When asked, he never has a real answer. _It is quietest in here._ Or, sometimes, _you are easier to talk to than the others._ Something that half-answers it, something that makes him seem as discomforted as he ever gets, because perhaps there _is_ no logic to it except for habit. A leftover impulse from his fried emotional center that tells him to seek her out.

Maybe that’s wishful thinking. She clings to it anyway.

“Remember,” she tells him the morning she is to leave. “You should sleep in here instead of the mage’s tower while I’m gone. Lock the door at night, and don’t open it to anyone but Cullen. In fact, if anyone tells you to do anything, don’t do it unless Cullen confirms the orders. Varric too, though I…I doubt he’ll ask you for anything. I don’t think he likes talking to you much. Never liked you much before, I don’t think, but he seems about as torn up by all this,” she waves her hand to his forehead idly, the sunburst she has come to live with, “as Bethany was. Or the dog, even. Sorry, sorry. I know. Off track. Do you understand?”

“Only Commander Cullen,” Anders intones. He does not ask why, though she’s prepared a dozen warnings for him. People will hate him, or will try to take advantage of him, or will try to trick him into leaping from the battlements to “free” him. She’s paralyzed with fear to leave him here, but it just doesn’t make sense to take him into danger when there’s a safe place for him to stay.

Cullen is a different man now, and she believes him when he says that he’ll watch over Anders, but it still stokes the fires of her anxiety to think of Anders here, helpless. Maybe she should kill him now, to keep anything from happening to him when she’s away.

She doesn’t. At this point, she’s not sure she even could.

Sometimes Anders asks her if she will help him with something, asks her for interpretations of peoples’ motivations. Sometimes he’ll ask, with a deadened voice and a still-horrifying lack of expression, if she wouldn’t mind brushing his hair and pulling it back the way he used to like to wear it, because “it is a pleasant sensation, and you are better at it than I am”. He can be so oddly dependent on her, can make her believe that he _needs_ her, sometimes, and she still loves him desperately, though it has evolved into a different, strange sort of love. Odd to look at him and every day see the man she used to lust after and now see something that makes her so mad with guilt. She wasn’t lying to Cullen – she hasn’t touched him. At night she lies in bed and remembers curling around him, remembers holding him, remembers three years of nightly comfort and lovemaking and gentle, idle touches. But he isn’t Anders anymore, and she has never _once_ come even close to making the mistake of thinking that he is. She grieves for the man she lost as if he has died, and she cares for the man that remains in whatever way she can. It’s like tending to a ghost, but she has become used to it.

It is her penance, she told Cullen, and she wasn’t lying then, either. It is her penance to have him so close and to know that he’s never coming back. 

He tried to hug her once, when she was crying and overwhelmed, thinking that it was something she needed, remembering from their time together that she took comfort in his embrace, but she pulled away, and she told him to never do it again, and he hasn’t.

She pretends, for a moment, ready to leave for an untold amount of time, that he would try to hug her now if she hadn’t already forbidden it.

“I’ll be back soon,” she says. “You’ll help the healers, I assume. They’ll be glad to have you for so long.”

“I will teach them everything I know,” Anders replies.

“If you need anything to help with healing or your writing, talk to Cullen, okay? He’ll get you what you need.”

“I think my presence distresses him. The way it used to distress you.”

“Make no mistake, sweetheart. It still distresses me,” Marian mutters, hoisting her bag. “That’s the whole point.”

“I apologize.”

“Don’t. It’s not your fault. I’ll miss you. Ridiculous to say, but I will.”

She turns to head for the door, giving him a final smile and a wave.

“Be careful,” he tells her, and her steps falter. She looks at him over her shoulder, not quite daring to hope. His face is blank, but for just a _moment_ , she could have sworn that his voice wavered.

It’s funny, because with Anders having been made Tranquil, it feels some days like she’s been given the same treatment. She cried, at first. Raged. Hated herself so acutely that she considered following Anders’ original plan and ending it all for the both of them. The old Anders, the Anders full of melodrama and angst, would have loved that, probably. But that was a momentary lapse of strength, a momentary weakness. She has rebuilt herself into someone stronger and stonier than before. She wonders if Anders would have liked this version of Marian Hawke. Yes, she helps the mages, and no, she hasn’t hidden from her guilt, but sometimes she feels like there’s so little left of the woman he fell in love with.

“I’ll be careful,” she promises. She wasn’t expecting anything to flicker across his face, wasn’t expecting tears in his eyes. Still. After all these years, she has the capacity for disappointment.

* * *

“I thought he was supposed to be dead.”

Cullen doesn’t like the way people talk about Anders as if he isn’t there anymore, even though he’s guilty of the same. He remembers the fiery-eyed apostate, always lurking behind Hawke as if to jump out and protect her, even though _he_ was the one who should have been more careful around the Gallows.

It’s this strange feeling, to have known the man before and to see him tamed and Tranquil and _gone_.

_You don’t understand_ , he wants to tell them. _He wasn’t always like this_.

He’s known Tranquil before and after the rite, of course. But to see a man once so against Templar rule submit himself to the frequent taunts and jeers and not-so-subtle loathing of the Templars in the Inquisition’s ranks is unsettling on a level he’s never experienced. Maker’s breath, he might actually be _glad_ that Evelyn insisted they side with the mages.

“He _is_ supposed to be dead,” Cullen admits, his voice pitched low so that Anders can’t hear him. Cassandra makes a disgusted noise and turns to him, brows furrowed. “ _I’m_ not the one who kept him alive. As for the person who did: _you_ thought she’d make a good Inquisitor.”

“Perhaps the Champion is not all I expected her to be, but she still would have made a good leader,” Cassandra says, defensive. Then this horrible little mischievous expression comes over her face, and she says, “not as good as Lady Trevelyan, perhaps.”

It could mean _anything_ , but he knows it doesn’t, so he feels his face heating up with a flush. He’s glad Evelyn and Hawke are off _together_ , far off in Crestwood, nowhere near here. Bad enough when he has to try to talk to _one_ of them. Both of them in the same place? It has been a nightmare.

“He’s not doing anyone any harm here,” he says, desperately wanting to change the subject. “If Varric hadn’t reacted the way he did when he first saw him, no one would even know.”

“He’s a distraction,” Cassandra argues. “And he divides the forces.”

She’s right about that last part; there aren’t many Templars still in their ranks, but Cullen sees them cataloguing the reactions when the mages approach Anders. Some of the mages blame him for ruining their lives in the Circles. They yell at him, spit on him, finally slink off looking shamefaced because they, more than anyone else, know the pointlessness and cruelty of mistreating a Tranquil. Some of them reach out and take his hands with reverence, bowing low to him, as if he’s capable of requiring that. The Templars haven’t done anything rash, not yet, but he worries over how carefully they take notice.

“What would you have me do? Lock him away? That would be pointless cruelty. At least this way he’s _helping_.”

“What did The Inquisitor say?”

Cullen sighs, decides not to mention that Evelyn was one of the reverent ones, who looked at Anders with gleaming devastation in her eyes, who pressed her lips to the brand on his forehead and wiped tears from her face.

Decides not to mention his _own_ complicated feelings on the man: if Anders had not done what he did, if he hadn’t started the rebellion in such a dramatic fashion, then Cullen never would have met Evelyn. And even if they _had_ met, they wouldn’t have been able to act on their mutual feelings. They likely would not have even _had_ them. Anders’ act was heinous, and Cullen will never stop seeing it as such, but it gave Cullen a new perspective. In a strange, horrifying way, he’s grateful for it.

Hates himself for it, too, when he remembers the chaos of Kirkwall in the aftermath. But he could never fully regret anything that brought him to a place where he would be able to feel what he feels for _her._  

“The Inquisitor says he should be allowed to help,” he answers diplomatically. “It’s only until Hawke comes back.”

“And then she will take her pet Tranquil and leave, is that it?” Cassandra sounds flinty, angry, but he sees the way she watches the former mage. Cullen isn’t _so_ oblivious: he knows that Cassandra has read Tale of the Champion. She’s said things to him before that indicate she’s probably more familiar with it than _he_ is, and she was quick to seek him out for this position, just as she was quick to seek out Hawke. That can hardly be a coincidence. It seems likely that at least slightly charmed by the tragic love story between Marian Hawke and her apostate rebel.

“She couldn’t kill him. She loved him too much,” he points out. The Seeker shoots him a dangerous look, as if she can read what he’s thinking.

“She should have loved him enough to do it,” she replies. “It’s what he would have wanted. _That_ would have been love.”

“It would have been a waste,” Cullen says, thinking again of the awe on Evelyn’s face when she first laid eyes on the man whose act of vengeance had freed her from her life in the Circle. “But perhaps you’re right.”


	4. our state cannot be severed, we are one, one flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself

 

“Anders?”

“Commander. Do you require my assistance?”

“No. I’m just…I’m surprised to see you here.”

“This is where I always am.”

Cullen tries to keep his expression blank, though he knows that Anders wouldn’t care if he laughed outright. Still, he’s beginning to understand what Marian meant when she described him as _shockingly still a shit._ Beginning to understand why she said, _half the time I think he’s fucking with me_.

“I only meant that I expected you to be with Hawke.”

Anders looks up from the unconscious patient he is examining, and there’s something like surprise in the jerkiness of his movement, although none of it is reflected on his face.

“Marian is back?” he asks, and Cullen nods. “Where is she?”

“She was headed to the War Room, last I saw her. With Varric. When I can manage to locate the Inquisitor, we are to meet to discuss our next steps. You haven’t seen Lady Trevelyan, have you?”

“No. Was Marian injured?”

“Injured? No. Angry, perhaps.”

“The last letter she wrote to me indicated that she would be gone a while yet. I had not expected her so soon.”

“She writes to you?” Cullen asks.

He can’t help the suspicion. He wants to trust Marian when she says that she understands Anders’ current state, and after all, she has lived with the man for years. Surely she knows that her former lover is not the man he once was.

Even still, he can’t help but worry. He has known people – not only Templars, but _usually_ Templars – who have seen nonexistent adoration in Tranquil compliance. People who were not vigilant, who did not understand, and who found it all too easy to believe that Tranquil willingness to do anything they were asked was based on something other than the complete lack of feeling.

He would be lying to himself if he said he was not concerned about Marian Hawke. The fact that she has kept Anders alive for so long is troubling. He understands her better than he did back in Kirkwall. He knows now what it feels like to love someone to distraction, to believe that he would do anything for them, but _this_? If she truly does understand that there is nothing tying Anders to her but convenience, that there is no emotion left of the man who loved her, then why is she still doing this?

“ _Why_ does she write to you?” he finds himself elaborating.

“To keep me informed. When we are separated – which is an infrequent occurrence – it is always possible that we will need to meet at another location. She keeps me apprised of her progress. It is strategic.”

It turns out that even Cullen isn’t immune to reading into the Tranquil’s speech: it is certainly his imagination, but there is something _defensive_ about Anders’ words. His tone, as ever, is blank and careless, but _it is strategic_ seems a surprising thing for a Tranquil to say. They don’t often interpret the meanings behind the actions of others. They are not often capable of it.

“Tell me…why do you stay with her, Anders? She told me that she has given you the option to leave before. Is that true?”

“Yes. It is true.”

“And yet you stay anyway?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

_Still a shit_ , Cullen thinks, unable to hide the quirk of a grin, this time. _Hawke was right._

“I only meant that if she is in any way inappropriate with you…”

“Ah. I understand what you are asking, and there is no reason for you to concern yourself. Marian is very careful with me. She has not done anything you would consider inappropriate. In fact, she is careful to touch me as little as possible. This is also strategic. It helps her to remember. She calls it ‘having boundaries’. She has laid them out for me and for herself, and we are both to keep to them unless grievous injury demands them to be crossed.”

“Right,” Cullen says, unable to help the small, incredulous chuckle this time. But it’s a relief to hear.

“As to your earlier question: I stay with her because she allows me to. I see no reason to leave.”

“Right.”

“I am sure that Marian would be pleased that you are concerned. She is pleased when people are concerned for me.”

“I’m…I’m sure that’s true.”

“She loves me.”

Surprised to hear the statement said so baldly, so without emotion, without care, Cullen’s next repetition of “right” is slightly more hesitant.

“I have made you uncomfortable,” Anders decides.

“I suppose. It is…odd. To hear a Tranquil say what you’re saying now. It doesn’t often happen.”

“I understand. You will perhaps admit that I am not typical of a mage who has been made Tranquil. This state is often chosen by the mage in question. They submit to it willingly, with an open mind. I would not have chosen this for myself, except for circumstances being what they were. And you will likely agree that I was perhaps more firm in my beliefs than many others who have been put to the brand. More…angry. I was very aware of my own emotions. I had better understanding of them than most. Bethany has theorized that that may be why I remain more cognizant. In combination with Marian’s continued attentions. Her explanations. It is easier to remember.”

“To remember what, Anders?”

“What I would have wanted.”

“I…what? What you would have _wanted_?”

“Yes. If I was not Tranquil.”

“What do you think you would say to me now? If you were not Tranquil.”

“I doubt it would be polite,” Anders says, and Cullen _does_ laugh this time, though it’s a tense, uncertain laugh. “I tell you all of this to explain. Obviously, I do not love Marian any longer. That is impossible. But I would have. That is why I stay. The man I was would have wanted me to.”

“Right,” Cullen says, a fourth time now, and this time it’s smaller than the others. Sad. Wishing he hadn’t asked.

“If that is all, I should find Marian. I have found that she is often injured even when she claims she is not.”

“Yes, that’s fine, Anders. Thank you for answering honestly.”

“I am always honest,” Anders points out, and it stirs something sour in Cullen’s gut, because it’s true.

* * *

“I did not realize you had returned.”

_Well, shit_ , Varric thinks, his shoulders tensing at the creepy, monotone nothingness of Anders’ voice as it echoes down the hallway towards them. It gives him the shivers. And the worst part is that Marian hardly seems to notice anymore just how fucked up this whole thing is. The first time she showed up to visit, Blondie trailing behind her just like he used to, she was ashamed. Could hardly stand to look Varric in the eyes. He’d told her he would never judge her, and that remains (sort of) true, but it freaks him out that she’s now so used to it.

How could she have ever gotten used to _this_?

Anders joins them, dressed in robes that look close enough to the ones he used to wear in Kirkwall, but there’s no disguising the sunburst of the Chantry on his forehead, and it makes Varric sick. He finds himself unaccountably annoyed that Evelyn had to run off to solve someone else’s problems, delaying this fucking meeting long enough for Anders to wander down to the War Room to find he and Hawke standing outside its doors.

“I figured you were busy,” Marian says, casual, hands still planted on her hips, as they were when she was teasing Varric for nearly falling off his horse earlier. He can imagine how she would have draped herself over Anders if they were back in Kirkwall. Bounding up to him, their arms going so easily around each other, as if they had been separated for years instead of hours. It used to make he and Isabela gag with overblown annoyance, but he’d give _anything_ to see that pathetically grateful smile on Anders’ face again.

“You take priority,” Anders says simply, and in the blank words, Varric can almost hear the echo of _I’m never too busy for you, Marian, for Andraste’s sake! Come to me when you’re hurt!_ What was it, seven years ago? He and Isabela dragging Marian into Anders’ clinic, the mage flashing blue and Justice-y for just a second with shock. Flashing again, anger this time, when he asked why Marian hadn’t brought a healer along and her response had been a slightly petulant, _you’re always so busy here. Wouldn’t want to interrupt._

He shakes the memory off like he would a spiderweb clinging to his mind. Even something so innocent is tainted by everything that came after, like _every_ memory of happier times with their friends in Kirkwall.

“Maybe I should go find Evie,” he says, and Anders looks at him, blinks, says nothing.

“Why? You’re going to have to get used to him eventually.” Marian is almost mocking, but for the sharper edge to it.

“Yeah, I’m not thinking that’ll happen anytime soon.”

“Oh, so you _want_ to go another three years without seeing this _beautiful_ face?” Marian asks, gesturing to her fine cheekbones and big green eyes. More scars than she used to have, but still perfect. “Because I think you missed me.”

The absurdity of the understatement makes Varric laugh, though his eyes dart over to Anders when he does it.

“Look,” Marian sighs, noticing. Of _course_ she noticed. “Just talk to him like you used to. He’s not any less intelligent than he was. He can understand everything. And, hey, he was always kind of distracted before! It’s probably not all that different!”

“You’re putting a dress on a druffalo and trying to tell me it’s Queen Cousland,” Varric says, gesturing to Anders with some odd, defensive anger. “I’m not the weird one here, Hawke. _You_ are the weird one!”

“It is surprising that you are not more understanding of Marian’s plight, considering…Bianca,” Anders says. Like everything else that comes out of his mouth now, it’s perfectly innocent, unthinking, unsmiling. Varric’s eyebrows climb to his fucking hairline.

“Is he…is he _sassing_ me?” he asks Marian, who’s busy trying not to laugh. “Is this the part where you reveal you two have been playing a four-year-long con on everyone, because…well, okay, because I could get behind that.”

“No, I wish,” Marian says with a slightly mournful sigh, though the humor hasn’t entirely left her tone. She rests her hand briefly on Anders’ shoulder, gives him a proud smile, pushes the hair out of his face. Then she retreats, puts her hands back on her hips, fingers curled into fists, like the tips have been burned and she’s trying not to show that she’s in pain. “I think it’s my fault, actually.”

“We’ve been over this.”

“Not the whole Tranquility thing. I _know_ that’s my fault. I mean the sassiness thing. We’ve been traveling together a hell of a lot longer than most Tranquil stay with the same non-Tranquil person. I think he’s picking up some of my speech patterns.”

When Varric laughs this time, it’s more real than it was.

“Oh, great. Now I’ve got to deal with _two_ assholes.”

“It defies belief that you did not consider me an asshole before,” Anders points out, and his blankness is still creepy, is still something horrifying, is still something Varric might never understand, but he and Marian both laugh enough for three anyway.

* * *

Before Adamant, when the Inquisition’s forces are camped for the night before the morning’s push on the fortress, Anders finds her. She’d had no idea that he would be traveling with Cullen and the troops, and so she can’t help the sound of pleased surprise when she walks into her tent after a strategy meeting with Evelyn and her advisors and finds him standing there, waiting for her.

He must sense her shock, because his face adopts that strange smiling expression he makes when he thinks someone might be uncomfortable. It was a bit of a relief to meet other Tranquil at Skyhold and realize that they _all_ do it: they have an instinct, or perhaps it’s simply logical, to make other people as comfortable as possible. They smile because they think it helps.

“I thought I told you you don’t need to do that with me,” she points out, grinning, starting to unbuckle her armor to get ready for bed. He lets the expression fall from his face, and she’s glad. His eyes don’t crinkle at the corners when he does it, the way they used to. Those fine lines that radiated outward showed his sorrows as well as his joy, and seeing them always made her feel so _fond_ of him. Now, it makes her shudder to see the lack of them, to see the falseness made so physical. It reminds her of the weeks before the explosion, when he was only half himself.

Anders steps forward to help her, and Marian tries very hard not to think of what Cullen told her about Maddox. The loyalty that he has shown in following Samson, the Templar who tried to help him before he was turned Tranquil. It makes her sick if she thinks of it for too long, if she remembers that Kirkwall poisoned those men just as it poisoned she and Anders. Could that have been them? Could Marian have been won over to the side of evil? If Corypheus had approached her, had promised her a way to fix Anders…

“You are troubled,” Anders observes, hanging her armor gently on the stand in her tent as if this is something he always does for her. As if they don’t usually spend their nights in cramped cottages and threadbare blankets turned pathetic shelter. As if Marian doesn’t usually just leave her armor wherever it lands. She scoffs a bit, shrugs, pulls her lank hair back into a ponytail and searches about her desk for something to tie it with. Anders calmly pushes her hands away, and she sighs, letting the limp black strands fall back against her neck. Anders begins to gather it, plaiting it with the same amount of care he always does. Her shoulders hunch a bit with discomfort, but she lets him.

“There’s a lot to be troubled about,” she murmurs.

“Is there anything I can help with?”

“Not really.”

“Would it help you to talk?”

“Don’t you have something you should be doing?”

“I was told you are injured. I came to help.”

“Oh. Right. Forgot about that. Whoever said I was _injured_ was exaggerating.”

She holds up her arm so he can see the long gash that runs up the underside of it, a dark line through her skin. He finishes her hair, first, and then bends down to take a look.

“I believe I asked you to be careful,” he says, and if not for the complete lack of expression or tone, she would think it was a joke. She laughs anyway, because she’s desperate for these possibly-sarcastic moments from him. Even knowing that they don’t mean anything, she craves them. They are signs of life. Illusions, but she hoards them.

“Well, you know me. I’m reckless.”

“You are too reckless.”

“Still here, aren’t I?”

“That is primarily because of me.”

“More true than you know, love,” Marian says, and there’s another laugh, though this one is worse, sadder, more obviously fake. She swallows it with a grimace. “How much do you know about Samson?”

“I have heard things. I have only recently left Commander Cullen. He wanted to ask me some questions about Maddox.”

“Right. About his loyalty?”

“Yes. He has asked me before why I continue to travel with you. He was more interested this time in the mechanics of the loyalty Maddox has displayed. He asked if there was any chance at a weakness. Although he eventually turned to asking why that loyalty might be. He remembered our earlier conversation, but I believe he needed to hear it repeated. To make him…feel better. I believe it discomfits him that Maddox and I both display something that he feels we should not be capable of.”

“What did you tell Cullen, love?”

“I told him that if a mage experienced uncommonly strong feelings for a person before they were made Tranquil, they would remember those feelings after, though they would not feel them any longer. The memory itself leaves an impression. A rational mind understands that it is not in its natural state, feeling no emotion, and is able to work through what their emotional self would have done. There is every chance that Maddox felt safest with Samson when he was still a mage. After, he would have remembered that.”

“Like how _you_ remembered that I help people.”

“And that I loved you,” Anders says, a gentle reminder, and she waves him off. He doesn’t see the gesture; he’s halfway across the tent, looking for bandages, and she takes a pull from the bottle of whiskey beside her bedroll, needing something to distract her from the emptiness of his tone when he said the words.

“If anyone saw this, the way we talk to each other, the way I talk to _you_ …I wonder what they’d think. I worry about it too, sometimes.”

“I do not understand. Please explain further.”

“I mean, it’s just pretending, isn’t it? _I’m_ pretending that you give a shit about me. Pretending that you’re…you.”

“I am…”

“…Anders, yes. I know. You say that.” She sighs, takes another deep breath to clear her head. “But you’re _not._ And I know that. But I still can’t let you go. It’s madness. If I saw this in someone else, if I was one of those soldiers out there, I would think it madness. And I’m beginning to fear that they’re right. I’m sorry. I’m feeling frustrated tonight. Stressed about tomorrow. I don’t mean to take it out on you.”

“I know that. It is not like you to speak harshly to me.”

“No,” Marian says, soft, thoughtful. “I guess it isn’t.”

It isn’t his fault. She’s usually so careful to remind herself of that, to speak to him accordingly, to treat him with kindness. This frustration with him, this passive aggressive snarkiness, isn’t _her_. She knows better than anyone that if he had a choice, if he had any control, he would still be here, would still love her. _She_ was the one who drove him away. She worries that she might be reaching the end of her tolerance for this fucked up non-relationship she has with the man she lost years ago.

“I’m sorry,” she tells him, looking at him, trying to meet his eyes, but he doesn’t look up or say anything as he begins to prepare the bandages, because he understands that she knows by now that any slight is forgiven. Anders doesn’t hold grudges anymore.

“You are distracted,” he says. “Concerned about tomorrow. But is that all? Speaking of Maddox and Samson seemed to distress Commander Cullen. Has it also distressed you?”

“I suppose it has.”

“Why?”

Without thinking, Marian replies, “because they could have been us.”

Anders stills only for a moment, thinking about her words as if they are a simple logic puzzle and not akin to a devastating revelation.

“I would need more evidence to draw that conclusion,” he eventually decides, and she turns to look at him, to look at his mirthless eyes and the sunburst on his forehead. With her free hand, she reaches her thumb up and brushes it over the mark, where he’s managed to smudge some ink.

“I think…I think I would burn the world alive if it meant I could have you back,” she says, a whispered confession, a secret that will burn inside her if she doesn’t let it out, and so she says it, her eyes spilling over with tears when the truth of it sticks to her insides. Anders brushes her tears away like he does everything else: automatic, unthinking, unfeeling.

“No. You would not,” he says. It might have sounded like faith, if it had come from anyone else.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Samson was already a Templar. He already had the capacity for cruelty,” Anders states simply, and Marian’s laugh hides a sob, this time.

“At least you still talk shit about Templars,” she says, and Anders continues to bandage, and he doesn’t reply.

* * *

In the morning, she finds him standing outside her tent.

“This time, you should take my advice when I say to be careful,” he says, handing her a mug of tea for her hangover. She thanks him, kisses him briefly on the forehead the way she does sometimes when she’s feeling particularly guilty. Her frustration from last night is still a cloud over her, so she overcompensates.

“Was that a joke?” she wonders when she pulls back, and Anders stares blankly at her. “No. I thought not.”

“It was a request,” Anders replies.

“Right.”

“I cannot heal you with magic anymore.”

“Yes, Anders, thank you. I’m aware of that. Take care of yourself. If you start hearing any weird Warden shit in here,” she taps the side of his head with one finger, arching an eyebrow at him, “you tell someone and you get out of here, all right? Not sure what to expect with a Tranquil Warden, but I imagine you’re probably susceptible to the same stuff that’s got the rest of them acting all crazy.”

“I understand,” Anders says.

“Good. I’ll see you when I get back. Oh, and thanks for the tea, love.”

If she knew that was the last thing she would say to him for more than two years, she probably would have picked something a little flashier.


	5. under her own weight groaning

Later, after they’ve been in the Fade and out again, after Stroud has stayed behind and sacrificed himself, Evelyn finds Marian by the fire at Adamant and sits down beside her.

“The demon,” the mage says, wasting no time. “What it said to you.”

“A prick, wasn’t it?” Marian asks, trying to laugh around the still-trembling emptiness inside her. She can hear how shaky her voice is, and there’s this horrible moment where she misses Anders enough for it to make her stomach hurt. Not the Anders she left at the camp, the Anders she could reach in mere hours if she left now and rode hard enough, but the one who would have snuggled up beside her, knowing she needed him to kiss her on the temple. Knowing she needed him to tell her that it was going to be all right. He took three years to get around to it, but once he did, he was always so tactile. Pressing, pushing, nudging. Starved from years of self-imposed isolation, he always wanted her to feel like she was loved. She needs that now. She needs it so _badly._

“You’re afraid he hates you,” Evelyn continues, not backing down. Marian sighs, kicks a clod of dirt into the fire.

“I’m tired,” she tells Evelyn. “I’ve been tired for so long, now. And as much as keeping him alive was a punishment for myself, it was…selfish, too. I can’t deny that. He isn’t himself anymore, but at least this way, I remember what he looked like. I remember what his voice sounded like, even if it sounds so different from what I wish it was. And there are parts of him that are the same. That’s the worst part, you know? I don’t know if I’ve ever told anyone that. He’s so close to the man I loved, and he’s so, _so_ fucking different. So, yes. Of course I worry about it. I’ve seen Tranquil restored before. Temporarily, I’ve seen them come back to themselves. And if that happened to him one day, and if he looked at me, if he hated me for…for keeping him alive all this time? Maker, I don’t know what that would do to me. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Evelyn shrugs, tucking her white-blonde hair behind her ear where it has escaped from the long braid she keeps pulled over one shoulder. She seems to be thinking about how best to answer, and Marian feels a little bad for snapping at her. She has always had a soft spot for Circle mages, after all.

“I suppose you always seem like you aren’t afraid of anything,” Evelyn finally says. “When I first met Varric and realized that he was _that_ Varric, that he knew you, I was so full of questions. I wanted to know everything. Especially as they started asking me for more, relying on me for more. I always wondered what you would have done. Especially when I found out that you were their first choice for Inquisitor.”

“I can think of about a hundred jokes. They write themselves. First that comes to mind, though? I’m surprised you’ve survived _this_ long, looking to my story for guidance.”

“No, don’t say that. You were a good role model. Still are. You were willing to sacrifice _everything_ in the Fade. You were willing to…”

“You don’t have to talk me up, sweetheart. I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I don’t need the flattery.”

“I’m only saying that I wish you could see what I see.”

Marian smiles at that, dips her head a bit towards the mage. Maker, but she feels so old. Evelyn seems to be around the age Hawke was when she first arrived in Kirkwall. Twenty- _five_. She can’t remember what twenty-five felt like. What had it felt like to be so new and confident? Even having just lost Carver, even having lost _everything_ , she was so sure that she could fix everything if only someone let her try.

“If you see anything other than a broken fool, you’re kinder than you should be. But I think I can help. Let me guess: they ask you for everything. And you can’t say no. Lost children. Misplaced family heirlooms. Wayward gossip ruining reputations. They’ll drain you dry if you don’t learn to tell them to fuck off, kitten.”

“Yes,” Evelyn says quietly. “People do have a way of assuming I’ll help them, now. But I don’t mind those things so much. Those are the things I like best. Easier than the bigger, scarier things, anyway.”

“More like the Hero of Ferelden than me, then,” Marian teases, nudging Evelyn with her elbow. Evelyn smiles towards the fire, but it shimmers on her face, close to cracking, and Hawke knows that this is a moment where her patented sarcasm isn’t needed. “Do you…want advice? I warn you I’m not very good at it. I could try and think about what Elissa might say, if that would help.”

“Elissa?” Evelyn teases. “Maker, you’re on a first name basis with the Queen of Ferelden. Me? I’ve been booted from Redcliffe by her husband. Any advice you can give me will be treasured.”

“So _dramatic._ Take it from me, and I’ve been a fuckup for years, so I know what it looks like: you aren’t doing anything wrong. And I can tell that you won’t. You’re smart. You’re brave. You hardly blinked in the Fade.”

“You’re the _Champion_ ,” Evelyn says with exasperation. Marian laughs, kicks her legs out, crosses her ankles with a jaunty shrug.

She feels a guilty sort of squirming in her gut: it’s easier to be her old, carefree self. The ever-sarcastic Champion that people read about in Varric’s book.

It’s easier because Anders isn’t here.

This could be a world in which she killed him when he asked her to. A world in which she spent four years recovering from the loss of her love instead of dragging him around Thedas, keeping a shell of the man alive so that she wouldn’t have to _truly_ lose him. Could she have recovered in such a small span of time? Maybe she could have recovered enough to take up with Isabela again. Maybe she and Isabela and Fenris would all be together, Isabela’s boat taking them wherever they had a whim to go. They would keep out of the business of other people instead of throwing themselves into every cause.

Or, worse, this could be a world in which Anders hadn’t run off in a fit of attempted nobility after she made him think she couldn’t stand the sight of him. A world where the two of them were still whole, still in love, still on the run, romantic like she thought they were going to be in the beginning.

“I _was_ the Champion,” she says, good humored to cover up the real unease she always feels when people make her out to be anything good. “Now I’m just a sad old woman who has chained herself to a ghost.”

“Don’t say that,” Evelyn sighs. “I know why you did it. I understand.”

“You know that Varric doesn’t _actually_ know everything, right? Much as he pretends at it. I wouldn’t call my story with Anders accurately represented in his book.”

“No, I know. I just…I think about what I would do if it happened to someone I loved. I don’t think I’d be able to let them go, either. Even if they couldn’t remember me. Even if they couldn’t…return my affections.”

Marian has always been an uncommonly perceptive person, but she wouldn’t have needed to be to follow _this_ particular track.

“Thinking of a specific someone, are we?” she asks, and Evelyn flushes and looks away. “You know I heard the demon too, right? When it told you that _he_ could never truly love a mage. And speaking as someone who was once the subject of a certain Templar’s boyish affections…”

“Maker, please don’t,” Evelyn laughs, embarrassed, laughing, covering her face, checking around to make sure Cullen isn’t nearby.

“…I think you need to hear that Cullen is not the man he was when we were in Kirkwall. He was already a far better man than most of the assholes in that fucking order, but now that he’s left it, he has become someone far more reasonable. Honorable. And he can take a joke now, which is impressive. I’m sure that some of his changes are to do with the mess Anders and I left for he and Aveline to clean up, but I don’t think it would be too much of a guess to say that at least part of it is because of you. Cullen is…he’s been through a lot, from what Varric has told me. And considering the kind of man he could have ended up, I’d say we’re lucky he didn’t crack faster than Meredith when it all started to crumble. Instead, he stood up for the mages when he was forced to make a choice. Maker, I’m glad Anders can’t hear me saying this. It doesn’t make up for what he didn’t do in the beginning. That’s what Anders would say. But I’ve always had a certain fondness for Cullen, and I think…I think he’s a man who was dealt a poor hand of Wicked Grace but managed to do all right for himself, in the end. Cullen is different now. He’s better. I think he _already_ loves you. I think that demon was full of shit.”

“Maybe it was full of shit about a lot of things,” Evelyn says pointedly, smiling, still blushing but smug enough to look triumphant despite it, and Marian rolls her eyes.

“All right. Fine. I suppose we both talked each other into that one.”

She knows, though, that the demon was right about her: she _is_ selfish. She doomed Anders because of her anger, because she was not strong enough to see that he needed her to give him any sign of her love, and now she keeps him alive despite his wishes because she is too afraid to kill him. Too afraid to lose what she knows, in her heart, she has already lost.

If there is anything to be thankful for (or is it, morbidly, something closer to disappointed?), it’s that she did not see Justice in the Fade. She has no doubt what the spirit would have to say about what she has done.

* * *

Marian had not planned to leave it at that. To leave Anders at camp half a day’s ride away and then take off for Weisshaupt directly from Adamant, in the opposite direction of her former lover. But it happens that way, and so before she leaves the fortress, she finds Cullen.

“I know it’s asking a lot,” she starts.

“He’s helpful, and the healers love him. I can handle the people who don’t.”

She gives a bit of a wry smile because, Maker, she’s so predictable, isn’t she?

“My presence has protected him for a long time,” she says, quiet. “If there’s a reason…if there’s something that you can’t prevent. Just…please. Make sure it’s quick. I know you hate him for what he did, and I understand. But...well. I think it’s obvious what I’m trying to say.”

“I won’t let anything happen to him,” Cullen says, achingly sincere, and it’s good to be able to say that she believes him completely. Again she’s reminded of Carver. What kind of man would he have grown into, if he’d had a chance?

Probably not one half as loyal, if Carver’s early personality was any indication, and the thought makes her smile despite herself.

“Thank you, Cullen,” she says. If he’s suspicious at her earnestness, he doesn’t show it.

“Thank _you_.”

For helping Evelyn survive the Fade, no doubt. Marian smiles.

“You know how I feel about doomed romances, Commander,” she says, turning to go. “Just…be more careful with your mage than I was with mine. You’re still a prick sometimes, but I wouldn’t want you to suffer what I have.”

“Was it…” Cullen starts, sudden, like he can’t help himself. He flushes and stops when she turns back to look at him, and Hawke waits for him to work up the courage to continue. He does. “Was it worth it? Even after everything?”

Marian barks a laugh, and though it sounds like bitterness, she’s surprised to find that it doesn’t really feel like it. She’s glad that he’s asking. Glad that he understands. Glad that someone is acknowledging that, aside from everything he is to everyone else in Thedas, Anders was her _love_ , and he has been lost.

“Worth it? I don’t know,” she admits. “Maybe it _would_ be easier if I’d never met him. Certainly there would be a lot of people still alive who aren’t now because I helped him. But...Anders was the love of my life. I miss him every day. If I could go back? Stop myself from meeting him? I don’t think I’d be strong enough to.”

“That’s…as I expected. I’m sorry for asking. I don’t know what came over me.”

“You probably think me mad, but it’s no more mad than I know myself to be, you know.”

“I don’t think that. I probably did, back in Kirkwall, seeing the two of you together. I hardly understood it.”

“Wanted me for yourself, did you?” she asks, teasing.

“In a way, though I wasn’t delusional enough to think it would ever happen,” Cullen snorts, and she’s surprised enough to laugh in earnest.

“I never thought I’d get you to admit it.”

“Anyone with eyes could have seen it. Evelyn has taken to reading me portions of Tale of the Champion to tease me, and Varric wasn’t so far off the mark, so you know.”

“I appreciate you humiliating yourself like this for me. But I was actually being serious for once: I know what I must look like to you, and I know how it must seem. And I’m sorry for it. I must have been a disappointing person to be so infatuated with.”

“Not at all, Hawke.”

“It’s kind of you to say.”

“Varric said something to me, not long ago. I don’t think he even realized he said it, but…he said that you blame yourself for what happened to Anders. I wanted you to know that I’m sorry. And I…I don’t know. I know what it’s like to think you’re responsible for something just by virtue of having been there and survived, and I know that words don’t make it any easier. Attempts to relate certainly don’t help, and yet I find myself doing it anyway. I was nineteen, was barely a Templar, and everyone wanted to tell me how it wasn’t my fault, but I lived when the rest of them were killed. I know the arguments, but I _still_ tell myself if I had only done things differently. Been less afraid. Been more forceful. More brave.”

“If I had only spoken to him,” Marian agrees, smiling softly even though she’s a fire inside. Again she finds herself wanting Cullen to stop talking, but this time it’s not for anger. It’s for this strange pity that he thinks his situation is at all like hers. She knows little of what happened to Cullen in the Ferelden tower. She knows only that it warped his view of mages so harshly that he became the self-serious young man she knew in Kirkwall. And she knows that what happened _wasn’t_ Cullen’s fault. It’s as far from her situation as a thing can be. “If only I had held him, after. Just once, just long enough to tell him that I would still be there for him. That I wasn’t going to leave him. Instead, I grew angry with him when he spoke to me. I shoved him in the dirt. And do you know why?”

“No,” Cullen says, simply, seeming half afraid to say anything more, although he does. “I…I imagine it was not for lack of love.”

“No. It certainly wasn’t that. He was begging me to kill him, to leave him, and I was so _furious_ with him because he couldn’t see that that was impossible. How could I have done either of those things? And how could he believe it of me? I half thought he’d used me for the help I could provide him, and even then, I was too weak to confront him about it. I just kept quiet and hoped that it wouldn’t come to that, and yet there he was, giving me two options and never seeing that the third was there. Of course it was my fault, Cullen. I did what I always do. I pushed him away. Closed off my emotions. When I do that, it tends to be behind this veneer of sarcasm, as you probably well know, but this time it was just…utter blankness. I made him feel like the only option was to leave for my own good, and he was captured. I failed him. It _was_ my fault, Cullen, and nothing I do, and nothing you say, will ever change that.”

“Marian…”

“Nothing that follows that will be anything that people haven’t tried to tell me. You remember Bethany?”

“Of course. A sweeter girl I have never known.”

“A _girl_ your own age, remember.”

“She seemed so much younger. So sheltered. You protected her, I imagine.”

“Not as well as I should have. The point is that if even _she_ cannot get through to me, imagine what hope _you_ have.”

Cullen does smile now, seeming a bit relieved to have the sarcasm that he is better used to back in her voice.

“I suppose you’re right,” he says. “I am glad to hear that people have at least given it their all.”

“They have, but as hard as they may try, they can’t convince me of something that isn’t true. And neither can you. I should be going. Just…don’t wait too long to make _sure_ she knows you love her. Your sweet nervousness is, I assume, endearing to her, considering she can’t say your name without blushing.” She notices, of course, the way Cullen ducks his own head to hide the coloring in his cheeks, and she barely hides a smile in time. “But she needs assurance. For years, Anders and I pined after each other. I can’t speak for him, but I know that _I_ had so many moments of doubt. Wondering if he felt anything for me at all. So much time wasted. We only had three years together, Cullen. Three _years_. That’s nothing. That’s shorter than the time he’s been gone.”

“He’s not gone, though,” Cullen says, though he seems to know already what Marian is going to say.

“He is, and we both know that,” she says, obliging. “And I would do _anything_ to get him back. Anything. Don’t let that happen to you, understand?”

“I won’t. You’ll…come back for him?”

“I always do,” Marian says. She hopes her brilliant smile hides the fact that for a few long moments, the answer was, _I’m not sure._

* * *

Anders is waiting outside Marian’s tent when the party returns to camp. Evelyn falters when she sees him, but Cullen doesn’t. He tries to imagine how Anders would have reacted, if he wasn’t yet Tranquil, to be told that Hawke wasn’t coming back. Not that it matters; what would have shattered Anders years ago won’t even make a dent in him now.

These past hours, since they left Marian and began the journey back, Cullen has been considering it. Thinking about what he would do. If Evelyn came back from a mission, rendered Tranquil, if she was taken from him, would he do what Marian had done? Keep Evelyn close by, keep her always near him as a reminder of what he’d done wrong, what he’d lost? Evelyn, of course, wouldn’t ever blow up a Chantry, so they aren’t quite equivalent scenarios, but if she had? Cullen understands Marian Hawke so much better than he used to: if Evelyn wanted to run, he would run with her. If they called for her death, he would not grant it. And if she was Tranquil…?

“Is Marian dead?” Anders asks. There is a certain curiosity to his tone, but it’s the curiosity of a man who is thinking he might need to rearrange his plans. Cullen notices that Anders has a bag packed and slung over his shoulder, as if he was prepared to leave as soon as Marian was ready, having learned after years of staying mobile that Marian would want to move on once her part was done.    

“No,” Cullen says. “She lives. She had to take a journey to Weisshaupt to meet with the Wardens.”

Anders frowns thoughtfully and looks back down the road as if he expects to see Marian on her horse, waving him forward. It’s the least rational thing Cullen has ever seen a Tranquil do, but the moment is over quickly.

“She does not like me to talk to Wardens. Has she indicated that I am to stay with the Inquisition?”

“Yes. She’ll return when she can.”

“Did she leave a message for me?”

Cullen laughs a bit, wondering if Marian had even thought to leave the man a message. Then again, why would she? He wonders how long it took Marian to stop trying to treat Anders like she used to. To stop thinking he was interested in knowing how she was feeling. To stop thinking he’d get jealous or angry or would miss her when she was gone. To hear Varric tell of it, Anders was a dutiful, attentive lover, despite his many faults and distractions. How long did it take a person to realize that he would never be so again?

“Nothing you would have much use for, I’m afraid,” he says. “But she told me to watch out for you, and I will.”

Anders nods, asks if he can return to helping the healers with the wounded. Cullen allows it. Anders goes.

Evelyn stays a few steps behind him for the entire exchange. When Cullen turns to look at her, she’s hastily wiping away tears.

“I’m sorry,” she says when she sees him looking. “Just…poor Hawke.”

_Anders was the love of my life. I miss him every day_.

“Yes,” he agrees, swallowing back any pride, any Chantry-poisoned comment about Anders the abomination murderer being a terrible choice for the love of a person’s life. Because yes, poor Hawke, no matter what else there is.


	6. now the thought both of lost happiness and lasting pain torments him

Evelyn probably would have won Cullen’s admiration through her unquestionable skill, through her dedication to the Inquisition, through her willingness to take on the weight of the world despite all its cruelties to her. But it was her kindness to her friends, to he and the others in her inner circle who orbit around her, that first indicated to him that he may have fallen for her faster than he intended to.

So when she comes to him with Cassandra’s blessing, when she brings him pages of notes in her careful hand and lays out her plan for Anders, he knows that she’s suggesting it only after a great deal of thought, only after considering every angle, and only because she earnestly wants to help Hawke, Anders, and every mage in Thedas. Evelyn doesn’t look at the small picture anymore, if she ever did. He knows from listening to her talk through her decisions that she’s always trying to help the greatest number of people in everything she does.

“This…this is impossible,” he says when he skims halfway down the first page. Her even, unhurried script speaks of growing up in the Circle, and as always the reminder of who she would be if not for the war sparks some guilty gratitude within him, as well as a deeper, more present fear that the war might one day end with the mages at a disadvantage, and that he might have to make an even more difficult decision than the one that saw him leave the order.

“It’s possible,” Evelyn says, shifting her weight uncomfortably where she stands beside him, looming over him as he sits in the chair behind his desk. “Cassandra has done her research. She has done _nothing_ but research the past few weeks, and I’ve been helping her when I could. Dorian, too.”

Cullen is sure that they have been receiving help from Solas and Vivienne as well, and possibly others, but she said those names purposely, because she knew what they would mean: there are no three people in the Inquisition that Cullen trusts more than they. He looks up at her, and she reaches out automatically, smooths the worried line between his brows.

“How could the Chantry have kept this hidden?” he wonders. Evelyn’s eyebrow twitches just a little. She’s respectful, careful about his faith. About the Chantry he grew up with, even though she knows that he’s capable of separating spirituality with dedication to an institution that did grievous harm to them both. But sometimes he can hear the quips she doesn’t allow past her lips, and he grins now, admitting it. “Well, yes. Of _course_ they kept it hidden. But…Maker.”

Evelyn leans her hip against his desk, tapping thoughtfully against the paper in his hands before moving her fingers up to rest against his, skin on skin. She has become so much more comfortable in his presence than she was at first, but he hasn’t yet managed to not be flustered by her innocent touches and comments. He’s comfortable in their private moments. He is the one who reaches for _her,_ more often than not, needing to feel her under his fingertips. It’s the moments that used to be strictly professional, that would normally be shared standing ten feet apart, that have become charged, have changed, have become something lovely and fraught with the best kind of tension. He does not mind them, but they are uncommonly distracting.

Cullen has never been a man used to casual touch. The first time Evelyn had trailed her fingers down the side of his neck during a kiss, had touched the skin beneath his shirt, he had been forced to think back years to a healer’s emotionless ministrations to remember the last time a person touched him there. But Evelyn touches him often, just because she can. Probably because she, too, was once starving for even the most innocent intimacy. She touches him to comfort him, to comfort herself, to alert him to something. He has come to recognize the purpose of her touches.

Right now, she’s touching him as a polite heads-up, and he knows what she’s going to say before she says it.

“I’m about to get a bit ‘fuck the Chantry’, darling, just as a warning.”

Laughing, in part because he was right, he leans back, looks up at her, laces his fingers with hers so she’ll know it’s all right.

“ _You_? That’s shocking.”

“Oh, hush. The Chantry thinks they’ve placed their faith in people who have earned it. They expect their Knight-Commanders and their Knight-Captains and their Templars to exercise their powers in fairness and light. ‘Surely’, they think, ‘if they believe in the Maker and follow the rules, there will be no abuses’. Besides, we’re just _mages_. What’s a few broken ones if they can convince themselves that it was necessary to protect the rest? Tranquil are useful, and even their mere _presence_ is enough to serve as a warning to the rest of us. We’ll fall in line to avoid losing our capacity for feeling. Hold the threat of it over our heads, and we let them do whatever they want to us, because we think of _this_ the way we think of a death sentence.”

Cullen shifts in his seat, a wave of discomfort washing over him. Suddenly, he finds himself wishing she were farther away. Her closeness takes on a damning edge when they talk about these things, when he’s forced to remember what they both used to be. Power. Abuse. Mages and Templars. They can’t ever really stop being what they were, can they? Even with no Circle to enforce the rules, he feels it chafing. She can tell him as many times as she likes that she doesn’t blame him for what he was, that she understands him, that he’s a different man than he was after Kinloch, in Kirkwall. But he _was_ that man. And that man is still in there, buried under the intervening years and the experiences and the gradual loosening of the Chantry’s hold over him. He’s a better man than he was, but he’s still far from what she thinks he is. Still far from the man he wants to be.

“I suppose some of the power would be taken away if people knew it could be reversed,” he says. “But it…it’s never been tested successfully?”

“It has.” Leaning closer, she shuffles through the pages to find the correct one, and his eyes drift down to read her summary of Cassandra’s research. He feels a headache coming on, feels the shakiness of withdrawals rearing their pain-spiked heads. “ _Successfully_ here being…maybe a little generous.”

“Emotional instability,” he reads aloud, and she nods, brow furrowed as she looks him over. After a short silence, she holds up her hand, fingers curling like a question, and he nods, grateful for both the offer and her continued consideration for his trauma. She places her hand on the back of his neck, and he can feel the gentle wash of her healing magic soothing him, the headache retreating in the face of her power. As she heals, she talks, and he struggles to focus between the relief of her magic and the nearly-as-potent softness of her thumb brushing over the knob at the top of his spine.

“Emotions in the Tranquil are heightened, when they come back. The descriptions of what this means are rather terse, but what they _do_ describe sounds…distressing. And obviously that puts the mage and everyone around them at considerable risk. Possession, loss of control over their powers. They beg to be made Tranquil again, beg to be killed. It’s a dangerous task. Cassandra said, and I…I loathe to say it, but I _agree_ , that it wouldn’t often be worth it. Not unless a mage was made Tranquil without their consent or without adequate reason, of course. I’ll never understand why, but some of us _do_ request Tranquility. But the other ones, unfortunately, there are a lot of them. Worse since the war began.”

“Yes, there’s been a lot of that,” Cullen agrees quietly. Even just in Kirkwall, a too-high number of Tranquil sentences were carried out as punishments for crimes that didn’t even come close to warranting the sentence. And now that the Templars have cut ties with the Chantry, now that the worst of them no longer feel bound to use Tranquility only in the most dire of cases…

“Cassandra thinks it’s possible that the mage could regain control eventually, that their emotions could settle and they could recover. Go back to how they were before. But it’s…it’s difficult to say. None of these attempts lasted very long. They were made Tranquil again or killed before anything could be conclusively determined. But that’s for lack of initiative, I’m sure. What _reason_ would they have to study it? They don’t _want_ to reverse the rite. So they said ‘fuck it’, stopped researching it. But Cole can get me in touch with some people. They know how to perform the reversal.”

“I don’t disagree that it’s a noble pursuit. But you want… _Anders_?” he asks, disbelieving. “I know you’ll think this harsh, and perhaps you’re right, but Anders was hardly a paragon of emotional stability _before_ the rite. He was already possessed! The danger would be…”

“Cassandra has directed some of the mages towards researching ways to make it safer. She thinks Dagna could whip something up to suppress his powers, and _emotionally,_ I actually think he’s a perfect candidate. Don’t give me that look. We know he was terrified of Tranquility. We know he’ll want to fight it, rather than giving up and demanding to be made Tranquil again. He passed his Harrowing. Even his possession resulted because of his compassion, not any inherent instability or fear or lack of will! Actually, if you think about it, the amount of willpower it took to remain even _slightly_ himself with the spirit inside his head is staggering. We’ll need Templar support, of course. I’m not saying we go into this blindly hoping that it’ll turn out all right. I want you to be involved, to take precautions. Cassandra said you’d know how to handle him.”

“Did you remind her that the only _handling_ of mages I’ve done lately...?”

“I wanted you to take this seriously, but I’m proud of you for making that joke,” Evelyn admits, dropping a kiss to his forehead with a grin. He hides the pleased flush as best as he can, ducking his head and pretending to re-read the contents of the page in front of him.

“I _am_ taking it seriously,” he says finally. “It’s dangerous, Evelyn. You had to know I would say that.”

“Of course I did. Cassandra knew you’d say it too. She’s…she’s not taking it well, the fact that the Seekers have had this knowledge and haven’t made it public. I know it’s dangerous. I know it’s asking a lot of you, asking you to help us oversee restoring such a painful part of your past…”

“This isn’t about me,” he says with surprise.

“Of course it’s not _only_ about you, but I imagine you would rather that he wasn’t restored. That you’d rather he stay this way. As punishment for what he did.”

“What?” Cullen asks. He tries to quell the way his stomach sinks to hear her say that, but he can’t hide the expression on his face, and he sees the way her brow furrows with surprise to see it. “Is that what you think? Evie, I don’t…I don’t _like_ that this happened to him. I don’t relish the idea of keeping him in this state. Whatever he did, I…I…even back in Kirkwall, I wouldn’t have authorized it. It wasn’t done with my permission.”

“Of course not,” Evelyn says quickly, and her fingers are quickly in his hair, weaving a soothing pattern through his styled curls, but he hears relief in her voice, and it stings more than it has any right to.

_She knows what cruelties Templars are capable of_ , he reminds himself, and all her work unburdening the tension in his shoulders has been for nothing, and his jaw clenches and brings the headache back. _She knows better than to believe that you were not complicit in what happened in Kirkwall. She thinks you_ like _this. She thinks you believe he deserved it._

And hadn’t he? Once, hadn’t he said that very thing to a grieving Marian Hawke’s face?

“I doubt I will ever forgive Anders for what he did,” he says, his voice not nearly as sharp as he thought it would be. More mournful than he would like. “But I was part of the reason that he did it, and I have to accept responsibility for that. When too many people stay silent and allow abuses to continue, that breeds resentment. Rage. I was no small part of that. Whether I agreed with Meredith’s judgements or not, whether I was in any way sympathetic to the plight of the mages in Kirkwall, I prized order over justice, and I failed them.”

“Cullen, you know I didn’t mean to imply anything,” Evelyn says. He’s glad that she doesn’t disagree.

“You didn’t have to,” he says, sighing, placing the paper back down on the desk. “I do a fine job of blaming myself only for the easy parts, most days. Harder to accept my part in the larger politics of it, but that doesn’t make it any less true. It’s just, aside from the danger…I think that restoring Anders might be punishment more than anything else, from the way your notes make it sound. And Hawke asked me to look after him.”

_She also said that she would do anything to get him back,_ he reminds himself _._

“I understand that it’s not as if we can write and ask her for permission. Even Varric hasn’t heard from her. And if you truly think we should leave him, find some other way to test the reversal, I’ll understand. But I think this is the right thing to do, Cullen. And I hope you’ll agree.”

Cullen says that he’ll think about it, but even before she’s out of his office, he has made up his mind.

It’s what Marian said to him, about making sure that he take care of his mage, making sure that the same thing doesn’t happen to her.

It’s selfish, but he needs to know. He needs to make sure that if it _does_ happen to her, it can be fixed.

“Maker forgive me,” he says.

* * *

Anders understands what they are telling him, and he tells them that he would prefer not to endure what they have planned.

They do not listen.

He understands why, understands that people have trouble taking him at his word, that even Marian, who understands him better than anyone, who is patient and kind to him, never _truly_ listens to him. She lets him do what he thinks is best, does not order him around like most people do to Tranquil, but she tries to treat him as if he is not Tranquil, tries to _understand_ him, and so even she is not perfect in this.

He understands, but it is still difficult. No one believes him when he says that he is content enough, that he does not want the reversal, and so they continue with their plan. They shackle his wrists and his ankles. They ask him to kneel in the center of the cell, surrounded by people who will try to control him. Any words he speaks to try and tell them that all of this is unnecessary are ignored.

When it happens, when the people outside the cell and the people within it all fall silent, waiting for the trembling young man in front of Anders to finish the ritual, it is like a switch being flipped. There is nothing. Fog. A warm, comforting absence. But then there is a spark, and suddenly there is _everything_.

And it is _agony_.

Evelyn said to him, before, when he was nothing, that it would be painful.

“They beg for death, usually,” she said, quiet.

“What makes you think that I will be different?” he asked.

“By all accounts, you wanted life, freedom, _love_ , more than anything. I think you’ll be strong enough. Marian needs you to be strong. Just think of her.”

He isn’t strong enough. Maker forgive him, but he _isn’t_.

He’s screaming, trying to free his manacled wrists, but they’re bound tightly and he doesn’t have a hope. He can feel his magic burning inside him for the first time in years, but it has nowhere to go because the Templars outside this cage are ready, because the enchanted manacles keep him from incinerating everyone in all of Skyhold.

“Anders! Anders!” Her voice, Evelyn, her eyes large and brown, laced with flecks of gold, her blonde hair wavy around her face where it’s fallen out of her braid. She looks like Elissa. Elissa, who gave him a cat, who cared about him, who _believed_ in him, and the sound he lets out in response to that realization isn’t human. It’s a strangled, bitter sob, and it’s only the first of many, and he’s begging her. Begging Elissa, because he forgets, in the sting of everything flooding him at once, that this isn’t Elissa, that Elissa has been missing, that she’s gone.

“Please, Elissa,” he begs. “Elissa, please kill me.”

Her expression falters, and she looks over her shoulder. Cullen steps forward, a hand resting on her shoulder. Protecting. It flashes in his mind: Evelyn. Her name is Evelyn. He isn’t in Amaranthine anymore. He’s in Skyhold. He was… _Marian_.

The emotions are like a flood, are like an endless stream, filling him up and leaving him bursting at the seams. There’s no more room to put them, but they keep coming. Marian pulling away from him, crying, _don’t touch me, Anders_. The devastated look on her face in the doorway, Cullen and Aveline behind her, as he greeted her as a Tranquil for the first time. Her hand resting, gentle, on top of his head as he looked out at the ocean. He’s feeling the things he couldn’t feel when they happened. He’s feeling _all of it._

Her face, a thousand different sobs and tears and expressions of pain, and _he_ did that. He ruined her life. He chained her to himself so well that she couldn’t let him go even when she thought he was gone for good, and it’s his fault.

“I’m sorry,” is the next thing he says, and he says it a dozen times before Evelyn finally reaches out and touches him.

She sedates him, almost. He recognizes the feel of magic as something forgotten and then relearned again, and his senses fumble over it, untangle the feeling in his mind. He appreciates the careful work, especially when it dulls his senses just enough so that he can control himself. It feels like a wall being erected inside his mind, the work shoddy enough that he can still feel around it without the flood consuming him. But his emotions and magic strain inside him, pushing at her wall without his consent, and he knows that he’s going to have to learn how to pack himself away again. It’s up to _him_ , and he isn’t strong enough.

But for Marian, he has to be. She kept him alive even though every day he broke her heart by the simple fact of his presence and absence both. She kept him safe, protected him, _loved_ him so carefully and so perfectly. He has to see her again. He has to kiss her. Has to thank her. Has to make love to her. Years of lost time, and he can’t let that be for nothing.

“You can’t keep this up forever,” he warns Evelyn, his voice strained, his breath heavy, and he’s surprised to see tears in her eyes. She removes one hand from his arm to wipe them away with delicate, trembling fingers. When she returns her hand to him, it’s to grasp his fingers. He returns the pressure gratefully, clinging to her because she’s the first person he’s wanted to touch in years.

“I know,” Evelyn says, and her other hand strokes gently over his bare arm, soothing him with more magic and more touch, dulling the agony inside his mind. “I just needed you lucid. Just for a moment.”

His breathing is slowing, his head clearing. He feels terrible, but less terrible than he did, and he understands, now.

“When you stop, I’ll ask you to kill me again,” he tells her. “Don’t listen to me.”

That’s what she wanted to hear, and she nods. Squeezes his hand tighter.

“I won’t. I wouldn’t. Hawke…I owe Hawke a lot. And I want to do this for her. I want to save you for her.”

“I need to see her,” he says. His teeth are gritted against the mounting pain. He can tell that Evelyn is pushing herself to the limit to give him even this. The emotions are swelling again, threatening to burst forth. “If it doesn’t kill me first.”

“You’re okay,” she tells him, her voice intent, strong, refusing to allow him a moment of doubt. “You’ll be okay.”

“Don’t listen to anything I say.” Anders looks up at Cullen. He repeats the words, this time to the ex-Templar. “Don’t listen to anything I say.”

“We won’t,” Evelyn says. With one final squeeze, she releases his arm.


	7. long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light

It is three months before Anders is in any way coherent.

Evelyn bans Cullen and Varric from the dungeons within the first five days, because the sight of Varric causes Anders to dig his fingernails into the skin of his face as if he means to claw out his own eyes rather than deal with the guilt of seeing his old friend. His wrists are chained behind his back after that, to be released only when there are people in his cell to stop him from doing anything rash, but still he sobs bitterly and turns away when Varric tries speaking to him again.

Cullen elicits fear, rage, or guilt, to varying degrees, depending on how Anders is feeling that day, and Evelyn makes the determination that seeing Anders isn’t doing Cullen any good, either.

“It’s not about your own self-loathing,” she says to him, which perhaps would have sounded dismissive except that she’s touching his face with the utmost gentleness when she says it. Behind her, Anders rages around the gag someone had apparently deemed necessary today, and Cullen can feel the familiar cold discomfort that being in this dungeon brings him. He had known that it was going to be difficult, but it makes him feel ill to stand by and allow this torture to continue, even though he knows it’s what Anders wants. It brings him back to Kinloch and Kirkwall both, standing by and watching as mages were mistreated. He had promised himself that he wasn’t going to be that man anymore, but this is _different._ He has to remember that this is different. “I know that you want to help him, and I know that you feel that you have to be here, but I’m telling you that you don’t. I’ll take care of this, Cullen. I made the decision to pursue this, and Cassandra and I want to see it through. That doesn’t mean _you_ have to.”

She speaks with an even tone, as if unbothered by the groaning and clanking of chains as Anders fights to get free. Cullen, meanwhile, is beginning to feel _trapped._ His breathing is beginning to feel labored, and there’s a bead of sweat traveling down his back. Being down in the dungeons is bad enough for him normally. This is making it worse, is bringing the helplessness of Kinloch back to him, and he knows that Evelyn is right.

“I’ll be upstairs in the main hall. If you need anything…”

“I’ll send someone to fetch you straight away,” she promises, and then she kisses him without thinking.

Unsurprisingly, that sets Anders off again, though it’s sobs this time. Choking sounds of grief around the gag, sounds that may be Marian’s name.

* * *

It’s two more months before Cullen sees Anders again. The mage is thinner, paler, less frantic. He isn’t gagged, either, which makes Cullen’s steps stutter on the stone stairs when he notices. Cassandra and Evelyn are crouched before the cell, speaking to Anders quietly, and one of the Tranquil is feeding him, patient, as if he is a child. Anders doesn’t look up, doesn’t make eye contact with anyone. Shamefaced and silent.

“At least he has stopped screaming,” Cassandra says in the War Room later, but Evelyn just shakes her head.

“He tires himself out more easily from the screaming than he did at first,” she says. “That doesn’t mean he’s better. His emotions are still out of control. He can’t keep still for more than a few minutes at a time, and it exhausts him. He can’t sleep without a draught. He either talks endlessly or refuses to speak. His moods shift so quickly that it upsets even _him_. The more aware of himself he gets, the more frustrated and ashamed. It’s wearing him down.”

All Cullen hears are snatches of updates. Sanitized reports. Evelyn parses the information that she thinks the Inquisition needs, and she gives them all official updates over the war table. Later, in her quarters or his, she will whisper more details, but Cullen knows her nature well enough to know that she is keeping some things back, likely because she thinks the whole truth will upset him.

_He won’t eat unless I’m there to push the emotions back_ , she says, and he hears the strain in her voice and knows that it’s far more traumatizing than she’s letting on.

_He thought I was Elissa Cousland again today_ , she says, and he hears the tremors in her voice, and he knows that she is more affected than she’s acting.

_He asks for Hawke_ , means _he never stops asking for Hawke_ , and Cullen can see the tension it’s imparting on her, especially as the days go by without any word from Weisshaupt.

When she leaves for an excursion to the Emerald Graves, a much longer trip than the ones she has been taking for the past few months, Cullen is almost glad. It’s draining her to try and take care of Anders. She has enough to deal with without the weight of another person’s unbelievable pain.

It isn’t about Cullen. He knows that. He accepts that. Even still, the threads are easy enough to connect: Kirkwall’s toxic atmosphere was at least partially his fault. Anders was pushed to the brink by the abuses done to the mages, which Cullen could have tried to prevent or at least alleviate. Anders killed all those people, the innocent and the guilty and the middle-ground complicit, and that could have been avoided if only Cullen had turned against Meredith earlier. If only he hadn’t been blinded by his own hate, his own prejudices, his own trauma turning him into someone harsh, violent, paranoid, unfit to guard the mages as he was supposed to do.

It isn’t his fault, not completely, but that doesn’t stop himself from wearing it as if it is.

When she leaves for the Emerald Graves with Cassandra at her back, he’s glad, because it means that he can take charge of caring for Anders. He will be forced to take responsibility as he should have done years ago, when it would have made a difference. No more turning his head and pretending that this has nothing to do with him.

* * *

She’s been gone from Skyhold for several days when Cullen works up the nerve and carries Anders’ food tray into the dungeons. He means to simply drop it off in the cell and oversee the Templar shift change: small steps, small exposures to both the unstable mage and the dungeons themselves are how he’s going to conquer this particular fear.

Anders has several days’ worth of beard – shaving being too dangerous without Evelyn’s magic nearby to suppress his emotions – and his hair is disheveled, hanging in his face. It’s for that reason that he doesn’t seem particularly alert to Cullen until he’s already in the cell.

“How many?” Anders asks.

Cullen stops, half-crouched, frozen in the act of lowering the food tray to the ground for one of the Tranquil to take care of. It’s the tone of voice that has him shaken: the _awareness_. This isn’t the senseless panic and pain he has heard about for the past few months, or the blank nothing of Tranquility. He knew that Anders was getting _better_ , but he hadn’t quite considered what that would mean: this is the Anders of Kirkwall, and Cullen knows exactly what he is asking.

“In the initial blast? Or in the fighting that followed? Both are impossible to say.”

Anders lets out a laugh that’s not a laugh. A familiar enough sound from the times Cullen has been allowed to see him. It’s grief-stricken and near-sob, but the mage doesn’t lose control yet. Cullen can tell that Anders is wrapped tightly around himself, is holding his emotions in check only through a superhuman exertion of willpower, and Cullen finds himself earnestly impressed by it.

“I remember…asking,” Anders stutters out. Closes his eyes. When he finishes the sentence with “Marian”, it’s a sob, but he still clamps down on his grief, and he swallows. Shudders as if it’s a horrible-tasting concoction.

“But she wouldn’t tell you,” Cullen guesses.

“Maybe she didn’t know. I wasn’t…particularly curious to keep asking.”

He lets out a laugh that sounds horrifying, strangled and false, and Cullen returns it. He’s discomforted, but too struck by the fact that it seems earnestly meant to let it pass.

“I’d prefer it if I had a number for you. But we never…there was so much to do. At first, we tried to keep track. We tried to alert the families. I’m afraid we eventually had to give that up. I was first. Aveline not long after. Even she saw the folly in it. We had to do what we could to save the ones still living.”

“Kirkwall is still standing?”

Cullen isn’t sure if that’s a genuine question or not, but he says, “yes,” and he finally puts down the tray.

Maker, is he really going to do this?

Pulling off his gloves, he transitions from an uncomfortable crouch to a more casual half-kneel, one knee down, his arm braced on the other thigh. He holds out the spoon of stew for Anders, and Anders looks at it distrustfully.

“Seriously?” he asks.

“Shut up and eat it,” Cullen says, not unkindly, and Anders lets out another one of those terrible laughs. It sends a chill up Cullen’s spine as if the mage is wielding magic. Of course, he isn’t. He _can’t_ , not surrounded by Templars and the magic-dampening manacles and the runes Dagna crafted specifically for his cell. Cullen needs to remind himself of that, needs to remember how careful they all were in setting up this sanctuary. Needs to swallow his fear and keep going.

Perhaps it’s just habit, or perhaps a remembrance of the coldness of Anders’ voice from back in Kirkwall, when he was telegraphing his explosive intentions so obviously that they went unnoticed. The sweat is beading beneath his clothing, but this is the course he has determined on, and he will stay on it. He will be resolute.

Anders _does_ eat the food, though it seems to take a lot out of him to do it. He is red-faced, humiliated, and Cullen pretends not to notice, though he isn’t much more comfortable with this arrangement than Anders is.

“You must love this,” Anders finally says, when Cullen holds up the spoon again. Bitterness flashes across his expression for a moment before it is once again wrestled back. Cullen pretends to be oblivious, though he knows Anders won’t believe it.

“The stew? No, it’s dreadful.”

“Ugh. You’re not so different from how you were, are you?”

“I don’t think I would have tried to make a _joke_ in Kirkwall, do you?”

“Suppose that’s true. You wouldn’t have fucked a mage, either.”

Cullen falters, and Anders gives this terrible smirk that hardly reaches his eyes.

“Sorry,” Cullen finally says. “Manacled abominations aren’t my thing.”

“ _Two_ jokes. I guess I take it back. Also not an abomination anymore. You’ll have to find a better insult. But you know what I was saying.”

“I suppose she told you, then?”

“She didn’t have to, but yes. I think she was…rather desperate to talk to me. About anything. Keep me from screaming. So she talked about you.”

As if remembering the abuse he’s been putting his vocal cords through, Anders swallows, and Cullen holds up the water cup from the tray for him. Anders drinks from it eagerly.

“She does that,” he says, giving Anders some time to recollect himself. “Babbles when she’s nervous.”

“Like…Merrill?” Anders cringes when it takes him a moment to remember his former companion’s name. Cullen pretends not to notice that, too.

“More like Bethany, I should think.”

“Mm. She does seem to have Bethany’s heart.”

A sob, wrenching forth, and Anders shudders when he forces a second one back.

“Don’t overexert yourself,” Cullen warns, spooning another mouthful of stew into the now-pliant mage’s mouth.

“Existing is overexerting myself at this point,” Anders mutters. “I already told her. Evelyn. And the other one, the angry one? Shit. I forget again.”

“Cassandra,” Cullen says, smiling a bit.

“Cassandra. I told them. It’s worse than I ever…I understand now, why they ask to be killed. It’s not because they’re afraid to go back. That’s what I always thought. It’s because they _want_ to go back. Back to when nothing hurt. It’s sickening.”

“You want to be Tranquil again?” Cullen asks, disbelieving, and Anders shudders again, fists briefly clenching, his entire body trembling with attempted and barely held restraint. It reminds Cullen of something, although he can’t quite figure out what it is, at first.

“No!” Anders finally spits out. “I can’t do that to her. I can’t. But it hurt less. It didn’t hurt at all.”

Cullen holds up another spoonful, sensing that Anders is nearing the end of his ability to hold back the flood and wanting to get as much food into him as he can before that happens.

“Would it help you if I came back?” Cullen asks. “Or do you want me to stay away?”

Anders seems surprised by the question, and he looks Cullen over as if he can’t quite remember who he is.

“I don’t know. Should I expect a sermon?”

Cullen lets out a laugh at that, more because he thinks it will help Anders to hear it than because he wants to. Even that innocuous joke sounds tortured, unreal in Anders’ voice. Anders, this new Anders, this shadow, this twisted thing, is like a nightmare from his past suddenly come back to life, and Cullen isn’t sure he can handle it for much longer than this.

But he has to. It’s his responsibility. And so he will.

“No sermon,” he promises. “I’ll be back.”

“Maybe next time, get anyone else to do the actual feeding?” Anders asks weakly. “This was...weird.”

“Agreed.”

* * *

It’s only later, hunched over the bucket on the floor of his room, shivering from the sudden spike of withdrawals, that Cullen realizes what Anders’ steadfast, pained control had made him think of. It’s the tremors in his own body, the retching that wracks his entire frame, contorts his features. It’s the bitter, broken, half-sobs of sickness that force their way out of him. He laughs into the bucket, half-full of his own sick, and he leans back on his heels, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

For two people who have found themselves pitted against one another, they certainly do keep having things in common.

He writes a letter to Evelyn, informing her of his conversation with Anders. He doesn’t quite touch on the emotions that it made him feel. That’s for the safety of her bedchambers or his, whispered in the small space between them. It isn’t for this letter, which Leliana will no doubt intercept and read before sending it on.

When he finally crawls into bed, he dreams of Kirkwall again. The aftermath of the explosion. The fighting. The chaos. The fury.

It has been years now, but when he wakes up, he expects it to feel as fresh as it always does, as if the years have faded away and he’s still in the wreckage. But it feels oddly distant tonight. Fresher are the memories of Evelyn kneeling before Anders, eyes sparkling, hope and fear warring on her face. Fresher still the tense line of Anders hunched on the floor of the cell, fighting against the lack of control that has made his past months impossible to bear.

Kirkwall happened, and Cullen will never forget it. As he said to Evelyn, he will never forgive what Anders did. But he and Anders are both very different people than the men they were when they last faced each other in that city, and _Evelyn_ …

Evelyn has made him a better man than he ever dared to be. Cassandra dragged him forth. Aveline kept him from falling into despair, back in the beginning. Perhaps it even goes back to Elissa Cousland, rescuing him from Kinloch and showing him kindness he was in no position to deserve. He owes it to all of them to stop relying on them to keep him a good man. He owes it to all of them to choose the right thing, even when it requires facing a person who has more reason to hate him than almost anyone else.

* * *

“Chess,” he says, two days later, when Anders is lucid enough to look at him. Eyeing him hatefully, Anders nonetheless nods.

* * *

It becomes habit quicker than Cullen would have thought, and after several more weeks with Evelyn still gone, the Tranquil have stopped feeding Anders, when both men decide that it has stopped being strange. Cullen takes on the responsibility, spooning stew into Anders’ mouth, and it’s an oddly intimate thing for two people who wouldn’t call themselves friends, but who have been inching slowly in that direction.

“I’ve seen a lot of strangeness in my life,” Dorian says to Cullen one morning, catching him at the door to the dungeon, watching him struggle with the tray of food balanced in his arms. “But this? Commander, you shock me. And I’d better not hear that you allow him to win.”

“Anders doesn’t win,” Cullen laughs. “Because Anders doesn’t cheat.”

“Neither do I,” Dorian says with poorly feigned offense, but he seems proud as he watches Cullen go, and Cullen knows that Evelyn will be receiving a letter as soon as the raven can get to her: _Evie, dearest, you would not_ believe _what I saw in the main hall today…_

* * *

What they talk about varies. Sometimes they reminisce, with Anders struggling through stories about Marian and their friends. He often cries through those stories, but he has stopped being ashamed of the outpouring of emotion, and Cullen is patient, is outwardly unruffled, and he thinks that it helps. Sometimes they swap tales of growing up, because that’s safe enough territory, as long as they skip the part where Cullen wanted to be a Templar and don’t quite get to the age when Anders was taken away from his family and given over to the Circle.

They can eventually discuss Marian, at length, and Anders takes a ruthless pleasure in teasing Cullen for his obvious crush on her when they were in Kirkwall. They argue the merits of cats versus Mabari, and it’s during that argument that for the first time Anders laughs openly, reacting to a snide comment from Cullen that’s forgotten the moment he says it because the response is so surprising to both of them that it startles them into silence. And then it’s sheepishly exchanged smiles and a furious scribbling of notes from one of the mage women who has been observing outside the cell.

Another pleasure comes when Cullen begins to read The Tale of the Champion aloud during the evenings. He and Anders usually skirt the more difficult topics of their shared residence in Kirkwall, although more than one evening ends early after bitter words are exchanged by both parties. Usually, the unpleasantness is glossed over, and instead both men spend the time viciously tearing apart Varric’s retelling. Apparently they’ve both been uncomfortable around Varric for years – his protectiveness of both Marian and Evelyn making them natural targets of the dwarf’s ire – and so there is a camaraderie in getting to critique his work together, like gossipmongers, hidden and safe where he cannot hear them.

Anders laughs again when Cullen admits to using product in his hair to tame the curls. Cullen writes about it to Evelyn straight away.

She always writes back, and Cullen reads bits of her letters aloud to Anders, because it seems like the polite thing to do and because they run out of safe topics eventually. Anders gives advice on poultices for burns from the fireballs thrown by the Venatori, and he leaves messages for Evelyn as well. Pro-mage, anti-Templar rhetoric, sometimes, but Cullen transcribes even those faithfully, and he lets Anders peruse the letters before he sends them. It helps Anders to trust him more, helps Anders to understand that Cullen is not the blind, faithful Templar warrior he was back in Kirkwall. Anders has seen enough abuse in his life that he will likely never trust Cullen fully, and Cullen is prepared to accept that (he would have to be a hypocrite not to, because he will never fully trust Anders, either), but every bit makes it easier.

Eventually, when Anders is having trouble controlling his emotions one day, when he’s shuddering and tormented like he was the first time Cullen fed him, Cullen reveals that he is no longer taking lyrium. He discusses the symptoms with Anders, describes them with even more description and reluctant admittance of how close he has come to giving in than he has even divulged to Evelyn. Anders is quiet for a while, but eventually he asks for the use of his hands, and he scribbles down the recipe for a potion that should help with the worst of the headaches.

Before Evelyn returns, they are something close to friends, but Cullen doesn’t think that either of them will admit it any time soon.


	8. so heavenly love shall outdo hellish hate

The night before Evelyn is to return, Cullen is distracted during dinner, and it’s clear that Anders can tell. Dorian has come and gone – now that Anders has learned to control himself for longer periods, Dorian is no longer as uncomfortable around him as he was, and he’s a wonder at coming up with topics of conversation, so Cullen always welcomes his company – and now it’s just the two of them, several Templars just outside the cell, and a mage taking notes on Anders’ every word.

“Do you know what Evelyn’s greatest fear is?” Anders asks suddenly, drawing Cullen’s attention back to him. Cullen considers his answer as he stares down at the chess board and tries to make sense of his available moves. He’s had a difficult day, the withdrawals making him unfocused and bleary, and his nightmares were worse than usual last night. If it were Dorian across the chessboard, Cullen thinks he would probably say something about it. Perhaps ask for advice. It just doesn’t seem all that considerate to do it when Anders is involved. The man is under so much emotional strain. Anything Cullen suffers must seem like _nothing_ in comparison.

“I imagine she has a number of them,” he admits quietly. He’s half convinced that Anders is going to say _Templars_ , and he probably wouldn’t be wrong. Cullen hasn’t forgotten the way she paled, eyes wide, the way she took a stuttering step away from him when she realized for the first time what he used to be. “The complete destruction of the world is probably fairly high on the list.”

“Admittedly,” Anders says with a twisted half smile that’s a little too pained for Cullen’s liking; Anders has been pushing himself today. His control is fraying quicker than it usually does. “But she confessed it to me near the beginning. When she was…babbling.”

“Right,” Cullen says. He doesn’t like where this is going. Doesn’t like the almost coy tone Anders is employing. The bitterness. Whatever comes next, it won’t be good.

“She’s afraid that when this is over, when Corypheus has been destroyed and the Inquisition has been disbanded, that a new Divine will be chosen who will undo all that the mages have done. Send everyone back to the Circle. Make Tranquil the ones who won’t go.” Anders makes a sour face that doesn’t bother to hide how he feels about _that_. “And she’s afraid that when it’s time, that when they call for _her_ to join the rest…” He pauses, considering how to say it.

“She’s afraid I’ll let them take her,” Cullen murmurs, understanding. Loathing.

“She’s afraid you’ll think they made the right decision,” Anders says. It’s difficult to tell if he takes pleasure in the devastation on Cullen’s face. “She’s afraid that you haven’t changed all that much, after all. Order is more important than justice.”

Anders is watching him carefully, and Cullen wipes away the sweat that is suddenly on his brow. He swallows the nausea that threatens to rise.

“I’m not that man anymore,” he says, and his voice is stark and forceful, and he means it. He’s surprised to feel just how vehemently he means it. If they came for her, if they tried to take her, he would fight for her. If she wanted, he would run with her. He would go anywhere with Evelyn to keep from being torn from her side.

“And what exactly changes a man from the Cullen Rutherford of Kirkwall to the Cullen Rutherford of Skyhold?” Anders asks, eyebrow arching. “Surely not just a woman.”

“Why not just a woman?” Cullen’s laugh is a little desperate. “She’s a remarkable woman.”

“So is Marian, but she…” Anders trails off, and they both know what he was going to say: _she wasn’t enough to change me. She wasn’t enough to stop me._

“It wasn’t just Evelyn,” Cullen admits, mostly to say _anything_. “In truth, it was you.”

Anders laughs again. Bitter again. This black mood has been creeping over the mage for the past few days, and Cullen is relieved that Evelyn will be home soon to help him.

“Me?” Anders asks. “Or Justice?”

“Both of you, I suppose. Since you both planned the Chantry.”

Anders was plainly expecting a half-serious answer, and he seems angry that Cullen has chosen to respond with a soft, genuine thought.

“I don’t regret it, you know. Not even if I killed thousands. I don’t regret it, because mages should be free. Because Templars shouldn’t be allowed to do what they’ve been doing without punishment for _years_. I feel guilt for the lives I took, and for the difficulties that my actions have caused mages who have had to flee their Circles. But something _needed_ to be done. I will never regret it.”

“I know.”

Anders was plainly looking for a fight, and he seems disappointed when he realizes that it isn’t coming.

“You used to be a lot more stubborn than this,” he says, his words a growl of frustration.

“I know. I can pretend to still be, if you’d prefer.”

“Maybe.” Anders sighs, closes his eyes.

“You want someone to fight, because you’re frustrated that you’re suffering a setback. I’m the same way when the withdrawals come suddenly. You think you’re getting better, and then suddenly you’re reminded that you’re _not_ better _._ That it just won’t _happen_ like that, like you’ll wake up one morning and be cured. And you need to drown out the song. You need to fight something. I don’t mind if you need it to be me.”

“You should have _done_ something,” Anders says, hardly waiting for the permission to be out of Cullen’s mouth before he’s speaking. “You should have believed us when we told you that what was going on in the Gallows was beyond decency! You shouldn’t have been so fucking blinded to Meredith’s heretical nonsense that you allowed the constant torment and abuse of the people your _order_ claimed to exist to protect! How many were killed or were tortured or were made Tranquil under your rule? How many abused? For hundreds of years, my people have been tortured and locked up by yours, and you were no better. Templars locked me in the dark for a _year,_ they made us Tranquil for far less of a reason than blowing up a Chantry. They turned us against each other and did what they wanted with us, because they saw it as their _right_. And if I hadn’t done what I did in Kirkwall, you would still be back there, defending them. If Evelyn arrived at your Circle, you would have looked straight through her. Seen just another mage. Just another potential abomination to be fettered so you wouldn’t have to suffer again. May as well kill us all, because some of us hurt you, right? Perhaps you would have ordered Evelyn put to the brand yourself.”

Cullen keeps his gaze turned down, lowered to the chessboard, and it feels like an act of cowardice more than it feels like the act of submitting to judgement that he thought it would. His hand tightens on the pawn he’s holding, wishing he had his sword strapped to his hip, because clutching the pommel always makes him feel a little better.

Nothing Anders is saying is anything that he hasn’t told himself, but that doesn’t make it burn any less molten inside him to hear the words now. To hear them spoken by someone he once considered a monster.

“I know,” he says, when it seems Anders is waiting for an answer. And when he looks up to meet the mage’s eyes, he sees the loathing set deep within them. “I should have done more.”

“You should have done _anything_ ,” Anders growls.

The old defenses rise up within Cullen: _I was afraid_ , and _you don’t know what I saw in Kinloch Hold_ , and _I did something when I finally realized!_ But he doesn’t say them. They won’t matter to Anders. Not if they come from him. And anything he says will only be an excuse, anyway. Cullen believes firmly that Anders is right. If Cullen was as good a man as he is always aspiring to be, his past trauma would not have stopped him. His confusion would not have stopped him. He would have been strong enough to stand up to Meredith so much earlier.

He can imagine Evelyn’s protestations at this line of thought, but Evelyn isn’t here, and so he indulges in the self-loathing she always tries to dissuade him from.

“I know,” he says again. “I’ve been trying, in any way I can, to atone for that failure.”

Anders sneers, and Cullen can tell how little his assurances mean to a man who has suffered more than most because of his inaction.

“She needed me,” Anders says, and his voice is broken, shattered, no longer angry, because Cullen hasn’t given him anything he can respond to. “She needed me, and I wasn’t _there._ I wasn’t there, because your…your fucking _Templars…_ if they had just killed me, if they had just done what you asked them to do…”

“Anders,” Cullen says, reluctant, apologetic, trying to calm the rising panic that’s visible in the tension of Anders’ hunched shoulders.

“I earned an execution,” Anders spits. “I don’t deny it. Would you?”

Cullen hesitates, but eventually admits, “no” in a voice that’s small enough to feel pathetic.

“But they didn’t execute me. And she couldn’t…it’s my fault. I should have left her earlier. I shouldn’t have…shouldn’t have ever kissed her…” He sags, exhausted, and Cullen feels pity, indecision, feels unworthy of expressing any of that. He doesn’t quite know _what_ he feels.

“Anders,” he says again, and the mage looks up at him. The anger has come back to his eyes.

“I didn’t even _want_ to help her. I would just stand there. Waiting for her to be finished crying. Or raging. Drinking herself into a stupor, and I was right there. Right there, and I didn’t _care_. She needed me, and I did nothing but cause her more grief. Always, only grief, for as long as I’ve known her. How could she forgive me for leaving her like that? Why did she still…?” He breaks off again, weeping bitterly, and Cullen swallows back his own emotions. “I should have been there,” Anders says when he recovers enough to speak, although the sobs have left his voice raw. “And I wasn’t. And I blame both of us for that. I don’t think you’ll find forgiveness here, Cullen. If that’s what you’re looking for.”

“It isn’t,” Cullen says, though he knows that’s only half true.

“You can’t just…can’t just apologize and have it done. I see the way you look at mages still. You may think you’re better, think you’ve changed, but you’re still afraid of us. If it was up to you…” but he breaks off, shuddering, and Cullen never does hear what Anders thinks of this. “I…I’m afraid I’m not in the mood for conversation,” the mage says, sorrowful.

Cullen leaves before either of them figure out how to say anything else.

* * *

It’s Evelyn he finally speaks the words aloud to. After they’ve spent hours relearning each other in her bed, this reunion after such a long separation giving them the giddy chance to remember every spot and kiss and gentle caress that sets the other alight.

It’s the fact that he is so blissfully _happy_ with Evelyn safe in his arms, the feeling of her magic, once such a source of consternation for him, humming contentedly in the air and helping to soothe him towards sleep with its familiarity, with its mere association with the woman he loves. It’s the stark memory of Anders’ hatred from the previous day.

“I am not nearly good enough for you,” he says, into her hair. It’s a thought he’s spoken aloud a hundred times, a thought he’s kept to himself a thousand more. But she angles her head upward to look at him with surprise, because of course she senses that this is different than the other times he’s dared to say it.

“None of this, tonight,” she sighs, one hand extricating itself from where it has been curled against his chest, reaching up instead to cup his face. Her head tilts up enough to press her lips to the underside of his jaw, and contrary to his words he chases the sensation, nuzzling down towards her.

“I just want you to know that I will do everything I can to become the man you deserve.”

“And if I tell you you’re already exactly who I want you to be?” she asks, and he laughs, low and bitter. He still doesn’t pull away. He knows how much it hurts her when he does that, even if it’s because of him.

“I’d never let them take you,” he says, voice strangled with indecision, fear. He has been imagining it since the conversation with Anders. It kept him awake last night, turning it over in his mind. Would he die to keep her safe? Maker, but he thinks he would. He’s never felt anything so strong for someone else, and it terrifies him to realize the depths of what he would do for her. He would stand against the Chantry, the Templar order. He would stand against the Maker himself. He thinks of Marian Hawke again, the way she stood beside Anders even as Kirkwall burned around them. He had not understood it. Andraste preserve him, but he does now. He holds Evelyn tighter, and she presses the side of her face back against his chest as she understands.

“Anders,” she sighs. “Is that what this is about?”

“He says I should have done something in Kirkwall, and he’s right. I’ve always known that. Always…struggled with how much of that is hindsight and how much of it I should have acted on. But to hear it from someone else is different. If he’d said it to me near the beginning, before you and I had…it might have been enough to keep me away from you entirely, because you don’t deserve to be with a man you doubt for even a moment.”

“Cullen.” She’s alarmed, but he tightens the arm he has around her shoulders, presses his hand flat against her back, shakes his head in reassurance.

“Now it’s just…it has resolved me. I will become a man you deserve, Evelyn.”

“I know nothing I say will convince you otherwise, but you already _are_ ,” Evelyn says. He hugs her tighter and says nothing else as she falls asleep in his arms, but it hardens inside him into something like the determination that took him off Lyrium in the first place.

Anders was right. Before he destroyed the Chantry, Cullen never would have looked at Evelyn as anything other than a mage. A potential problem. A potential abomination. Someone who could so easily become like the ones who tortured him in Kinloch Hold. If Meredith had punished her, he would have assumed it was just. If she had been made Tranquil…he can hardly even finish the thought: he would have assumed that it had been done for the right reasons.

He is happier with her than he has ever been, is happier than he feels he has any right to be, and if they had met only a few years ago, he could have missed his chance at this entirely. He could have lived the rest of his life alone, without knowing it was possible to love someone this much. And a mage, at that. The Cullen of Kirkwall would never have been able to consider this a possibility.

There were a million factors that led him to being the man he was in Kirkwall. And there are a million more that have led him here, to Evelyn, to Skyhold and the Inquisition. If it takes him the rest of his life, he is going to make sure that he has earned the chance he knows he never should have been granted.

* * *

The progress is slower than any of them would wish, and yet it seems much faster than Cullen had expected. Anders’ progress is measurable. His periods of lucidity last longer than ever, and he begins gaining weight again, becoming less skeletal, less a shade of his former self.

He is allowed the full use of his hands without manacles after six months. He no longer tries to grab on anything within reach to end his suffering during the worst of his attacks, and he has better control over himself in the interim. His cell has been transformed in the intervening time into something warm and welcoming – a more comfortable bed, books and writing implements and a musical instrument and paints, even, because Vivienne suggests that it might help with the emotional outbursts (it doesn’t, though Anders discovers he has a talent for painting, and he uses it to pass the time when he is feeling more himself). Evelyn is made aware of the existence of a litter of kittens in Skyhold whose mother appears to have either died or run off, and so she and Cullen relocate them to Anders’ cell. It very nearly causes a setback as he weeps uncontrollably for much longer than he has been doing for the past few weeks, but after the initial shock, their presence does him noticeable good. The act of nurturing gives him something to focus his compassion on.

After that, he is allowed for short periods out of his cell and into another cell down the hall that has been transformed into a kind of training room. There, Evelyn and Dorian help him regain control over his magic. Cullen is not allowed anywhere near it at first – and in truth has no desire to be; the very idea of allowing Anders to be exposed to his magic without the tight control of Dagna’s runework makes him break out in cold sweat and brings the nightmares back for days. Fortunately, Anders has always gravitated towards spirit magic, healing, similar to Evelyn. The feeling of their magic is not so different, and eventually Cullen is able to be in the training cell without becoming nauseas.

It isn’t easy. Control slips often through Anders’ fingers, turning an attempted firebolt into a scorching area heat that has the other mages scrambling to put up their barriers and one time, early on, before the defeat of Corypheus, has them all in stitches watching the normally-composed Solas laughingly trying to put out a fire on Dorian’s robes. Anders chuckles with the rest of them, but back in his cell later, he rages, curses Cullen and the Templars for having ruined everything, for having made him into no better than a novice.

These are harrowing times, too, because without the dampening, with the emotional fluctuations, he is more susceptible to demonic possession than ever. Solas watches over Anders in the Fade, at first, when he is still with them, and he enlists the help of his friends to keep Anders from being too heavily targeted, but there is only so much that can be done. Most of the work is up to Anders himself, especially once both Corypheus and Solas are gone.

Anders never wavers. Never lets it get so bad that he might consider striking a deal with a demon. Still, Cullen worries.

Evelyn worries too. She never lets Anders know it, but she whispers her fears to Cullen later on the most difficult nights, voice thin and aching for all of them.

_What if he can’t do it? What if Hawke comes back, and we have to tell her that he’s dead? That he became an abomination again. That we had to kill him. What if we’ve put him through months of torture for nothing?_

But these worries are always short-lived. Anders always fights back.

After a year, he has mastered control of his magic again. There are times when his emotions are stronger than he can handle, and sometimes if he gets emotional while training his fingertips will spark with electricity, or freeze up with ice, and one time Cullen avoids the dungeon for a week after being hit with an unexpected blast of fire that scorches the side of his face, but over time the mage is able to stop even these outbursts.

In a somewhat related decision: three months after the year has ended, Anders is allowed to try healing again. Quietly, privately, only in the presence of those in the inner circle and the mages who have been allowed to know of his restoration. His first attempt at healing someone – a hasty, apologetic repair of the aforementioned face burn that Cullen suffered, with much reluctance on the former Templar’s part – goes well enough, though Anders cries through most of it and says it _hurts_ more than it used to. But that, too, gets slowly better with time and practice and patience on everyone’s part.

Always, _always_ , he only needs to be reminded of why he’s fighting, of the woman he’s fighting for, and then he comes back to himself. He squares his shoulders. He remembers that it’s worth it again. He keeps a painting of Marian by his bed, and he sometimes seem to revere it, centering himself around her, reminding himself of why he needs to have the strength to carry on. Cullen worries about what will happen if she stays away for much longer. He thinks it unwise for Anders to focus his recovery so much on one person – what if she doesn’t survive? What if she never returns? What if she rejects him for some reason? – but for now, he’s grateful that it seems to be working.

Several weeks after Anders is allowed to start healing, a large contingent of wounded soldiers returns from the Western Approach, and Anders spends nearly three straight days putting them back together. His face is hidden by a scarf pulled across his mouth, the brand of the Tranquil painted over by makeup done expertly by Josephine when he has to do his magic. No one tells anyone else who he is, and the stories of the mysterious healer linger.

It’s Cullen who puts forth the idea, but Anders agrees to it immediately: keep the Tranquil brand as it is, without trying to repair or remove it. Keep the facts of his survival and restoration a secret for as long as they can. People have become used to the idea of Anders the Tranquil living in Skyhold, because Tranquility is considered punishment enough for his crimes. If they knew that he was _himself_ again, those who had been reluctantly placated might not feel so forgiving.

So Anders wanders, when he is not needed. He helps with healing, applying poultices and administering potions. He hides his emotions when he is in public. Then hides his face when they need his hands to be more than just soothing.

After a year and six months, he is allowed his own room again. Is allowed to sleep outside of Dagna’s crafted cell.

Cullen doesn’t sleep soundly for almost three weeks after that.

He and Anders have become friendly, and he trusts the mage to an extent that would never have been possible back at the start. But this is an ultimate test, and so Cullen lays awake and listens, certain that he will hear screams, shouts, cries of _demon!_ in the night. He lies in bed, clutching Evelyn close to him when she’s there, clenching his fists in his bedsheets when she’s not, and he waits. 

He doesn’t ever hear the cries. Anders stays intact.

Anders weeps, still. More than he used to, by his own admission. Sometimes at random, with no evident trigger. Sometimes it’s something more obvious: a woman with Marian Hawke’s long dark hair arriving at Skyhold, or Varric asking for help with an injury, or a recently arrived rebel mage bending to kiss him on the forehead, reverent. He spends hours at a time in his room to control these outbursts without revealing himself to all of Skyhold, and Cullen eventually stops being tense, forces himself to stop assuming that something dark is happening in there.

He still fears when he can’t find Anders. Some days he fears what Anders might have done to himself. Sometimes he fears what Anders might be planning. But he always finds him, in the end. Sitting on the battlements, on a roof somewhere, hiding in the dungeon where he still feels safest when his powers fluctuate during the bad days.

Two years gone, and still no word from Marian, and Cullen goes three days without worrying about Anders at all before walking into his office and finding the mage waiting for him.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, blinking back surprise, and Anders lifts two mugs of ale in his hands, grinning a bit sheepishly.

“I heard about the Exalted Council,” he says. “Thought maybe you could use a drink.”

Which is how Anders winds up helping Cullen practice his upcoming proposal to Evelyn (practice that will, admittedly, fly from Cullen’s head when the actual moment comes, much to his chagrin), and how Cullen finally comes to admit to himself that he owes Anders more than he knows how to quantify. It still isn’t something easily spoken, still isn’t something he’s comfortable with, because the flames of Kirkwall will never leave him any more than the screams of Kinloch Hold will (any more than a year in solitary or the inhumanity of Tranquility will leave Anders, he supposes). But it has been a long journey for both of them, a journey that has left them both in very different places than the start. And perhaps it doesn’t _need_ to be spoken, anyway. It’s enough that it is felt, enough that he knows he will miss Anders when he and Evelyn are off at the Winter Palace, enough that Anders has come to feel as much a part of Skyhold as anyone else.

All that is needed to make it right, to make it close to perfect, is for Marian to come home and meet the man who has been waiting for her.


	9. they, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, through eden took their solitary way

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has been reading and commenting on this! I hope this is a satisfying conclusion?? If there's one thing I love writing, it's Emotionally Extra reunions! 
> 
> I know I'm mentioning this a little late, but if this is the kind of thing that interests you: "Lament" by Balmorhea has been my Anders/Hawke song since I first heard it, and I listened to it a LOT while doing this edit. And the last section was written while listening to Shenzou by Steven Price (specifically 1:20 onward) on repeat, and is entirely to blame for every word in it.

Marian Hawke experiences a very different two years, though there’s certainly enough terror and emotional tension and heatbreak to go around. And when she’s leaving Weisshaupt, trailing tiredly after her group of allies, the Warden fortress still in the process of exploding behind her, she feels the emptiness of nothing left to do.

“There’s always something left to do,” Elissa Cousland says when Marian dares to speak the thought aloud, and the Ferelden queen rolls her eyes, her daggers slipping back into her sheaths with a satisfying ring. “We solved a few big problems. Let’s just…enjoy that, for now. Not go looking for _more_ trouble out of boredom.”

That’s easy for Elissa, Marian thinks. Ravens fly in and out of every camp they set up, carrying coded messages that still drip with love, support, encouragement, even years after having been separated. Messages from her husband, who she now gets to go back to. Who she can now have a long-hoped-for child with. Who she can now live out the rest of her days with, a life as long as she deserves to have, because she’s gone and cured the fucking Calling, and now she has the chance to have everything she’s ever wanted.

And Marian? What does Marian have? A sister who’s probably furious with her for her lack of communication, friends who’ve all scattered, most of them probably thinking her insane or weak for leaving with Anders and then refusing to abandon him. An Inquisition that needed her and then replaced her when she couldn’t be found. A handful of people who remember her with fondness but who will not welcome her back as easily as Alistair will welcome Elissa.

She misses him. Maker help her, but she misses even _Tranquil_ Anders. Misses his thoughtless calm, the way he helped her on instinct, the way he came as close as he could to caring about her. She misses the way he would offer to braid her hair into the elaborate updo she preferred, the way he would prepare her hangover remedies without being asked. She misses his presence, the steady certainty that she would not be able to drive him away with her poor decisions or the inconsiderate things she sometimes said, because he was bound to her, somehow, and could no longer feel the pain of her accidentally inflicted wounds.

She misses having someone to love, even if he couldn’t love her back. It’s funny, because all this time Elissa has been separated physically from her love, though the letters that are passed between them are soaked in it, are written with such care and affection that Marian can practically _smell_ it. And all this time, Marian has spent beside Anders, physically in his space. Two strong women who became _wounded_ women, who found a lasting love and saw it interrupted by the world’s refusal to leave its heroes alone. No wonder Marian and Elissa have gotten along so well for the past two years.

People say that Elissa is emotionless, that she’s cold, that she’s a marble statue of a woman, but Marian knows her better than that, now. She knew Elissa for a long while only as the woman who saved Anders’ life and gave him a cat that he loved more than anything, and that was more than enough to make the rumors ring a little false. Now that Marian has seen the delicate way Elissa holds letters from her husband, the way she curls with her knees to her chest and reads his words by the light of the campfire, and then again in the morning, and then again after any tough battles before tucking them away to come out again when she _really_ needs them, she knows that Elissa Cousland is anything but cold. Elissa Cousland is a woman who keeps herself strong because she has to, because life has been cruel to her, and because she has been given no other choice.

Marian is glad that she will be allowed to witness at least this one blissful reunion. Glad that Elissa wants her company, wants her presence. It will be nice to be able to help facilitate some simple happiness after years of feeling so fucking empty.

* * *

They both agree to head to Skyhold first. Elissa had been devastated to hear about Anders, and she had immediately promised any amount of help that she could give. In her search for an end to the Calling, she had heard rumors of a reversal to the Rite of Tranquility, but she hadn’t been able to track down anything concrete. Not that that meant anything to Elissa (as she pointed out every time it came up: _I found the cure to_ _the_ _fucking Calling, Marian!_ ); once she got back to Denerim, once she had a chance to talk to Leliana again, in her new position as Divine Victoria, she was going to do everything in her considerable power to find the information they needed.

It wasn’t a promise of anything, certainly. They may search forever and find out that there was never any hope to begin with. But at least it will be a safe place. Alistair and Elissa will keep Anders from harm. Marian won’t have to worry about the unpredictability of Skyhold, of the dozens of moving parts that make up the Inquisition. She won’t have to worry about anyone wanting to take revenge on Anders, on her, on Evelyn Trevelyan.

She was ready to leave Anders at Skyhold. Move on, in whatever way she could. But with Elissa offering her another way, even the slightest bit of hope, she’s realizing that she never had much of a chance of moving on to begin with.

It was a nice thought, but she should have accepted a long time ago that there’s never been any hope of moving on from Anders. Not for her.

* * *

In the years that she’s been dealing with the bullshit at Weisshaupt, Thedas has changed. The Civil War at Weisshaupt and the singlemindedness of Elissa Cousland’s hunt for the cure were both the kinds of things that could occupy all of a person, but there was enough news from the outside world to know the big things: the Inquisition had succeeded, Corypheus had been defeated, and the mages had been set free by the new Divine.

Marian doesn’t quite start to cry upon hearing that last one, but something inside her shatters. Anders fought for half his life for the right to be free, to be allowed to love, to have a family like any other person. He had dreams of people like he and Marian being allowed to live in peace. And he had sacrificed so _much_ to allow others the chance he believed he would not live to have. Among all the injustices he has suffered, to be unable to appreciate this momentous victory seems, more than almost anything else, so bitterly unfair.

* * *

Skyhold is nicer than the last time Marian was here. Fewer holes in the roofs, for one. It’s outfitted like a village, with common folk bustling around the courtyard, trading and bartering and shouting happily to each other about whatever news from the outside world they’ve been able to pick up. There’s no one important left in the castle to greet them – anyone in the Inner Circle is in Orlais for the Exalted Council – which allows Marian and Elissa to slip in, unnoticed and unheralded.

They _are_ met by several servants and an offer of lavish guest bedrooms, however, because Leliana may have much bigger things to contend with, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to allow her best friend to receive anything other than the _best_ possible treatment. Elissa vanishes to take a bath and give Marian time to meet with Anders again. Not that that’s stated, but Marian understands the gesture for what it’s meant to be. It doesn’t much matter that the reunion won’t be emotional for Anders; it will be emotional for _her._  

“Is Anders still here?” she asks one of the servants, realizing only now that she’s already here that she doesn’t even know if he’s still alive. She and Elissa hadn’t sent any word ahead, aside from a bird to Leliana and another to Alistair, because they were trying to keep their movements as quiet as possible. What if something happened to him? It’s been more than two years, and she’s been unreachable. What if Cullen wasn’t able to protect him?

“Yes, mistress Hawke. He has a room in the mage’s tower. I can show you the way.”

Relieved, Marian nods.

* * *

When she’s standing outside his room, she takes some time to prepare herself. She’s tired, and she’s _sad_ , and this should be a happy reunion. She should be looking forward to this. But it’s been years since she saw him smile, since he laughed at a joke she made, since he curled up next to her and needed her softness to get him through a difficult moment.

It has been _years_ since he needed her, so why does she still need him so badly?

She almost walks away and leaves it. Almost tells Elissa _never mind_ , almost disappears into Thedas again, to find some other quest not her own to take on. Keeping busy has helped her, and she’s not sure she can go back to this. Her heart will soar upon seeing him again, her hands will flutter uselessly at her sides because she will want to pull him into a hug and never let him go. And he will greet her, and he will sound placidly content to see her, and then he will go back to his work. Can she really go back to being so _hollow_?

She doesn’t go anywhere. She knocks on the door.

There’s quiet for a moment, and she’s wondering if he’s down with the healers and she somehow missed seeing him, but finally she hears him say, “come in.”

She gives herself a few more seconds to breathe and try and control her erratic, foolish heart, and then she pushes the door open.

Anders is seated at a desk on the far side of the little room, half-turned around in his seat to see who has entered. The Tranquil brand is stark against the tanned skin of his forehead – he’s been outside lately, she can tell. She saw the overflow of injured scouts and soldiers in the courtyard, and imagines he’s probably been helping those who could not be moved to the infirmary.

When he realizes that it’s her, his eyes widen, and his mouth drops open as if to speak, and he stares. It’s the most animated she’s seen him since the Tranquility, and it brings a smile to her face despite the gulf that’s still inside her.

There was a part of her that expected the emptiness to fill up a bit, for the loneliness to fade. It was a hope she should have known better than to entertain, but she’s still a bit disappointed at how _desolate_ it feels to see his face.

“I’m sorry,” she says, half-laughing, ignoring the reflexive tears that she _knew_ would start to fill her eyes on seeing him. “I’ve startled you. I should have written ahead. But, Maker, it’s good to see you, Anders. I’ve missed you terribly.” She breaks eye contact when she feels the soft press of fur against her leg, and she laughs with delight when she sees the cats swarming around her feet, rubbing up against her. “Anders! They gave you cats? That’s wonderful!” Happy for the momentary distraction, for the time to control her expression, she crouches to scratch the nearest cat under the chin, eyes resolutely downward. “Must’ve been Evelyn’s idea? Seems like something she’d do. I…” She looks up to his face again, and her heart stutters to a stop when she sees his expression. The blank surprise, the placid pleasure she was expecting isn’t there. Anders, even Tranquil Anders, cares for her. He should be as glad to see her as he can be, but he doesn’t look it. He looks _devastated_. His eyes are crinkled at the corners, spilling tears, and he’s trying to say something, his mouth moving, but nothing’s coming out except this almost silent strangled sound. “Anders!” she says, voice shaking and urgent, and she goes to him, taking his face in her hands and looking down at him as if she can diagnose whatever it is that she’s accidentally done to him. But he just searches her face, eyes tracking hers, wide and disbelieving, and she has _no fucking clue_ what to do. “Anders, wait here, I’m sorry. I…I don’t know what... Did someone do something to you? Are you hurt? Oh, Maker, I shouldn’t have startled you like this. I’m so sorry! Hang on. I’ll get someone who can help!”

She turns to go, utterly panicked, but his fingers wrap around her wrist before she can take more than a step away, and he uses his grip on her to pull himself out of the chair, and he wraps around her in a hug so tight that it _hurts_. Her ribs compress in her chest, her nose pushed automatically into the skin at the side of his neck, burying into the softness there the way it used to when he was still whole.

She doesn’t pull away immediately, because she is weak, and because for a moment she can pretend that this is what he wants. That he is doing this because he missed her. That he cares for her the way he used to.

But the moment ends, and she moves her hands to his hips, and she tries to push him away.

“Wait,” he says, a strangled, whimpering sound, and he clings even tighter and trembles like a terrified kitten, and the tears she was trying to blink back spill over her lashes and fall down her face.

It can’t be. It never is. Every time she thinks she senses some hint of emotion, every time she thinks something miraculous must have happened, it has turned out to be false. But… _wait_ , he said, and he sounded so lost.

“Anders, what’s going on?” she asks. It’s a desperate last-ditch effort, her arms held stiffly down by her sides, afraid to touch him. Afraid to give in, because she has dreamed of this moment so many times, and it has _never_ been real.

“You’re _here_ ,” he says. And there’s emphasis. There’s tone. There’s a hundred words, a thousand, unspoken in the single syllable of _here_. A Tranquil doesn’t talk like that. A Tranquil _cannot_ talk like that, and her fingers spasm before curling into fists, because this has to be a trick. She cannot give in.

But…

“Are you _you_?” she asks, desperate. Anders nods. She feels it, his head bobbing up against the side of hers.

“Yes,” he says, to banish any doubt. “It’s me. It’s _me_. I’m back, Marian.”

The words, his _tone_ , it breaks whatever tenuous control she was keeping on herself. The small voice inside her, telling her not to hope, reminding her that it will only hurt more if she believes and then has that hope cast aside. She flings her arms around him, and she crushes him just as tightly as he is crushing her. He has filled out more since she last held him. He doesn’t feel so breakably thin. Still _too_ thin, still needing more food, and Leandra would still sigh with displeasure if she saw how he still looks like he hasn’t been taking care of himself, but it’s Anders again. It’s the Anders of those first years in Kirkwall, when he moved in with her and everything was almost perfect. “How? What happened? How long will you be like this?”

She doesn’t expect him to know the answers to any of those questions. She supposes it’s a bit of romantic foolishness to think that she’s brought him back to himself for just a few moments. Like the surprise of her presence after so long apart has jolted his emotions back into existence and they’ll fade again too quickly.

“For good, love,” Anders says, and Marian lets go.

She sobs, crying every cry she’s kept deep within her, every sob that wanted to be released every time she looked into his eyes and saw nothing but the warm amber color that used to hold so much mirth and sorrow and fury.

“That’s impossible,” she insists through her tears, but she holds him tighter, and she doesn’t ever want to let him go. This is a trick. Someone has convinced him to pretend. Someone has trained him to act as if he feels something for her. It’s a trap of some kind, meant to break her fully with the disappointment of dashed hopes. Or a dream, and she’ll wake up, and he’ll be the same man he has been since she shoved him into the dirt and turned her back on him.

“It’s not. I can…I can explain,” he says, but he just continues to stand there, shaking. But it offers proof enough, doesn’t it? There are hot tears falling onto her skin, against the side of her neck, tears because he, too, is crying. The sensation sends shivers down her spine. He’s _crying._

She has to look, has to pull back and see his eyes.

She does, and they are so _alive_.

He releases her reluctantly, and she brings her hands up to frame his face. He’s stooped over enough that he’s nearly on a level with her, and she’s glad for it, because she needs to look at him like this, as close as she can. The way his eyes twitch over her, taking in every inch of her face the way she’s doing to him. Her throat closes, chokes up, her hands moving down to clutch at his robes, to tangle her fingers in the fabric as if to keep him from stepping even another inch away.

“Can I kiss you?” she finds herself asking, chin tipped up towards him. That seeping dread, that fear that he won’t want her, that he will hate her for having done this to him, rears its ugly head, but he crosses the miniscule distance before she can think to pull away, and he answers her question with the press of his lips to hers.

“Marian, love. My heart. You can do whatever you want to me,” he murmurs against her, his voice a smile, his voice half purr, half laugh, and it’s so gloriously full of feeling. Marian draws herself up and kisses him again, hunger and shock and fear warring within her, and she wants to stop and ask him everything, but she also wants to kiss him while this lasts.

It’s when she pulls back again that it happens, desire shriveling up within her when she makes eye contact with that damned _sunburst_ , and she pulls away, backs up until her back hits the door to his room, one hand clamped to her mouth, the other held outstretched to keep him from chasing her. _Just like the Templars. You’re just like the Templars. You know he can’t be cured. You know he can’t want this._

“Wait,” she says, a strangled yelp of a word. “Anders, wait. _How_ is this…you can’t be…explain further, Anders, please.”

She’s begging, and Anders’ eyes spill over with emotion, and she wants so badly to believe it’s real, but it’s been two long years apart, and who’s to say she isn’t just seeing what she wants to see in her exhaustion? Two long years, and even more before that, living with his Tranquility. Shutting herself off. It’s been so long, she’s not sure she even remembers what real emotion looks like on his face. How can she trust that what she’s seeing is real? That what she’s seeing isn’t just what she _wants_ to see?

“Oh, Maker,” she breathes, sinking to the floor, knees drawn up to her chest, and she presses her forehead against her legs, blocking him out.

“It was Evelyn, love,” he says, and she hears him crouching down in front of her, but he doesn’t move close enough to touch. She loathes herself for wishing that he would. Loathes herself for wanting so badly to believe in the way he calls her _love._ “She and Cassandra uncovered a way to reverse it. I was an obvious choice for a test subject, I suppose.”

“But you still…” She gestures blindly with a wave of her fingers, and she looks up in time to see Anders brush his fingers over the brand with an expression of distaste.

“We thought it for the best that I continue to play the part. I’m still not…you should know that I’m not…” a heavy sigh, and the weariness feels as real as the adoration was, but she can’t trust herself to make that call. She _can’t._ “It’s been a while now since I’ve been _back_ , but it’s taken a long time for me to even get to _this_ state, and I feel I’m about to burst with love for you. I’m not trying to be poetic, either. I’m just reporting honestly. This is…a lot.”

“What do you mean?”

Curiosity winning over the impulse to hide her face until this nightmare ends. Anders shrugs, brushing his hand through his hair. It’s such a familiar gesture, from the years before he was made Tranquil, and she has to swallow another round of sobs.

“It’s…it’s hard to explain. Having emotions back after so long of _not_ having them was…I can hardly describe it. Agonizing. I was out of control for such a long time. I’m not even sure _how_ long. But it put a strain on all of us. I begged to be…” he sighs again, looking away as if afraid of her disappointment, and she realizes with a sickening lurch why that is: _I begged to be made Tranquil again_.

The truth of it comes to her slowly, as most things of a cataclysmic nature do. She sees what she didn’t see at first: the bits of toys strewn around this messy room. Lovingly crafted for the cats in his care. And the messiness itself! Tranquility made Anders tidy in a way he never was before, but there’s cat fur and abandoned bits of parchment and dirty laundry strewn around the room. There are warm, colorful blankets on his bed, and it’s piled high with pillows, the way he always liked.

Tranquil Anders had never cared about colors. He hadn’t cared about comfort, either. A single pillow was enough for him.

And there are paintings. Paintings of cats, mostly, affixed to his walls. An inexpert style, but lovely, and carefully constructed, and _warm._ There is a painting of Evelyn, and one of Elissa. There is a painting of Karl, and a painting of Varric, and one of Cullen and Leliana and Josephine together, on the steps of Skyhold.

And there’s one of _her_. A smile, her head ducked slightly down and a flush spread across her freckled cheeks as if she’s embarrassed, half-laughing. In the unfocused, blurry background she can see the royal reds of their Kirkwall bedroom, the canopy of their bed protecting them from a world that wanted them apart.

She cannot trust herself, she cannot allow herself to believe this, because clawing out of the misery of this arrangement only to find that she has been lied to would be a disappointment too great for her to endure, but the evidence is all around her.

She finally looks up at him and allows herself to see the anxiousness in his expression. He is worried about her reaction. He is worried _for_ her. The warmth inside her chest is unfamiliar now, rusty with disuse: the singular warmth of loving a person and seeing from their expression that they feel the same. Can this really be so simple?

She draws her knees down slowly, crossing her legs in front of her, leaning over to reach for his hands. He sinks from a crouch to a kneel, on his knees before her like a penitent worshipper, and she always hated when he made her feel like he _revered_ her. But it’s familiar. It’s _him._ The hate is cut with wonderment, with a slowly mounting acceptance. He meets her hands in the middle with his own, and she squeezes his fingers desperately, eyes searching his.

“I’m so sorry,” is what she finally says, and it’s an admittance: _I believe you. I believe this is real_. “I’m _so_ sorry Anders. I should have been here. I shouldn’t have left you to suffer that alone.”

“You didn’t know.”

“No, but I still…”

“It might have been worse if you were there. Seeing Varric again, it was hard to want to even _breathe_ for the guilt of remembering the lives I ruined. Yours, most of all.”

She hasn’t heard this tone in so long. Not except in dreams, which were always not quite close enough to the truth. Mournful, guilty, reflecting.

“Maker, I did _not_ miss the self-loathing,” she whispers, which is half a lie because she missed _all of it_. She releases one of his hands and dares to reach up, dares to trail her fingers through his unbound hair. He laughs a little, self-conscious, ducking his head and inching closer to her, basking in her warmth the way he used to. Her heart is hammering in her ears with every infinitesimal bit of evidence that tells her she has not lost her mind entirely.

“You would have hated it. You would have felt so hopeless. It’s probably for the best that you didn’t have to see me like that. Evelyn was there, and Cassandra and Helisma and the rest of them. They helped me. It was…difficult. For a long while. I’m surprised they didn’t just kill me when it got bad. But they kept trying. And more of them, as the months went on. Dorian, and Vivienne – she’s the one who thought of the painting, though she _did_ spend most of the time trying to talk up the Circles, ugh – and _Cullen_. I think we might be friends now. It’s terrible.”

“Now I _know_ this is a dream,” she says, only half-joking, and Anders reacts to the doubt in her voice by coming closer still, close enough to tuck one arm around her shoulders and pull her into him.

“If it were a dream, this wouldn’t last,” he whispers into her ear, nuzzling his head against hers with love sparking through his skin. “But you’ll see, sweetheart. I’m here.”

_I’m here_. Such simple words, spoken so starkly, and they mean more than the world to her in this moment. He’s here. He’s _here_. For so long, for years now, she has languished without him, has almost given up on him, but he’s here now, he’s back when he was never supposed to return to her. She closes her eyes, because she can’t look at the brand. Not again. And she kisses him.

Marian once would have pinned him to the bed, straddled him, torn off his clothes and made furious love to him the way he has always liked it: with her in control, her calling the shots. Demanding obedience from him. Demanding love from him. But neither of them are the people they once were, and they’re both tired, and afraid, and delicate with one another. She still half-fears releasing the restraint she has kept on herself. Years of only experiencing sex with casual acquaintances, with people met in taverns while Anders slept in rented rooms a floor or two away, have changed her so fundamentally that she knows it’s going to take time to come back to herself.

And, Maker, what if he resents those infrequent dalliances? He seemed to know when they occurred. He seemed to suspect, at least. And now he will have the ability to be jealous of them.

It’s a worry that lasts the span of thirty seconds, because he can _argue_ with her now. He can tell her that he doesn’t want her to do something. He can be dissatisfied with her lack of commitment. He can complain about her lack of direction, about inaction, about ignorance. He can whine again. He can _hate_ again.

She kisses him more fiercely, but she breaks it early to crush him against her in a bruising hug, returning the pressure that he exerted on her at first.

“Never leave me again,” she says, a forceful command.

“I won’t. I won’t ever leave you. I promise.”

“I’m so sorry. I’m _so_ sorry. I never meant…I was always going to…you must think I’m…”

“I remember everything, Marian,” he says. His voice is careful, gentle, so different from the blunted lack of care that she has become used to. “And you apologized to me, explained to me, so _many_ times. I remember all of it. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s over, now. And I shouldn’t have assumed…I thought I was doing the right thing for you. I thought…well. Let’s not...”

“Leaving is never doing the right thing for me,” Marian says, urgent, grabbing him tighter. “You need to know that. Please. Even if you think you’re doing it for the right reasons.”

“I know. I won’t. Trust me, love. I’m here. I’m staying right here.”

The Marian Hawke of Kirkwall would have fucked him into the mattress without a second thought, but this Marian Hawke is still wary of the sunburst mark on his forehead, is still holding herself rigid to keep from giving in, to keep from becoming like those Templars who saw what they wanted to see in Tranquil faces, who took what they wanted to take from Tranquil bodies. She kisses him gently, with trepidation, and she checks his eyes often, needing to see the soft adoration within them.

Anders understands. He does not push, or rush. The act of merely holding each other seems to be overwhelming enough, and in the middle of conversation, of recounting the horrors of the past few years, he will sob, dropping his face onto her shoulder and weeping openly.

He’s not entirely like the Anders of Kirkwall – Justice is gone, and he’s so _raw_ from being scraped back into his emotional state – and he’s nothing like the Tranquil man most recently in her memory, but she loves him so fiercely for being such a perfect blend of the men she remembers. She clings to him while he cries, cradles him against her. The act of holding him is enough. Touching his skin. Asking him, “is this okay”, and hearing “Maker, _yes_ ,” in an awed, reverent voice, nothing like the “this is fine” monotone that would have come from him before.

She _fears_ the difference in him, and the difference that he must see in her. When the morning comes and the haze of this reunion is gone, will there be enough left of the mage and the warrior who fell in love in Darkdown and the Deep Roads and the blasted streets of Kirkwall? Or will they realize that they’re clinging to something that hasn’t existed for years now? The time spent apart weighs heavily on her, terrifies her, but she holds him all the tighter for it. She has spent hopeless years by his side, never thinking that there could be a happy end to it. There is hope now. She has to believe that there is hope.

She doesn’t fuck him into the mattress, but eventually their gentle kisses turn to more pressure, more desperate contact, and Anders is the one who rolls on top of her and presses a heated trail of kisses down the column of her throat.

“For the first time, it will only be me,” he says to her, eyelashes fluttering as he peers up at her from where he has settled at her chest, as he slides further down her body, skin trembling, breath ghosting over one of her breasts. She hitches her breath and she tries to think of something funny to say, and she keeps her eyes steadfast on his so that she can see the life in them and not the sunburst mark that frightens her. “No Justice. Just me. Just you. No one’s in here telling me that every second spent on pleasure is a waste of time. I can take as long as I need. Would that be all right, love?”

Her eyes strain with the difficulty of not straying up to the mark, but she nods. She suspects that she needs this almost as much as he does.

“Maker, yes,” she breathes, and he continues.

* * *

After, they both cry.

This will never be repeated, will never be mentioned to anyone, but it’s cathartic in the glow of their mutual release, the unburdening of their souls to each other.

It will take more than one drawn out fuck and a night of crying to one another to heal all that’s happened to them, but Marian knows this is a start.

“It’s going to take some getting used to,” she admits to him, quietly, after they’ve both fallen asleep and then awoken again to find, to their mutual amazement, the other still here, _real_ , not a trick.

“My having a personality?” Anders asks, and Marian trails her fingers through his hair.

“Yes,” she admits. “Actually giving me input, instead of just…me trying to figure out what you would have done.”

“It might not have seemed to make much of a difference at the time, but I want you to know that I…that I love that you cared enough to do that for me. To keep trying. I would think of it all the time as I was coming back to myself.”

“What was it like?” she whispers, and Anders shivers a little, hunkers down a little more, his head pillowed on her chest. She draws the blankets further around them both because she knows he likes to feel safe, cocooned against her. He smiles up at her appreciatively.

“It was like a dream,” he says quietly. “Like I was moving through water. Heavy limbs and fogged-up head. I remember so much of it, but it’s…it’s impossible to say what it felt like, because it didn’t feel like anything.”

“You used to tell me it was peaceful.”

“It was. It was also horrifying. But only in hindsight. It wasn’t so bad, love. You don’t have to be afraid.”

She sighs, a watery and pathetic sound, because that’s _it_.

“I thought you would hate me, if you ever came back. I thought it would be like Karl. Coming back to yourself just a bit, just for a while. I thought you’d curse me and beg me to kill you and demand to know why I hadn’t done it already.”

“I might’ve, but that wouldn’t have really been me. The first few moments after the ritual were…they were the worst of it. I wonder now that Karl didn’t react as strongly. He must have had remarkable control. It was like being torn from a safe place and put suddenly into a building that was on fire. Maybe that’s a terrible way to describe it, but I’m tired, and I’m afraid I’m not making much sense.”

“You don’t have to make sense,” Marian says, pulling him closer. “Just sleep, love. I’m here. I just want you to know, I just…I want to say it: it’s going to take some getting used to, but please never doubt that I love you. I’ll never forgive myself for the way I treated you after Kirkwall. I was angry. I was too blinded to see that you needed me to give _any_ sign of reassurance that I didn’t regret letting you live. Please, _please_ never doubt that again. I’ll do everything in my power to prove it to you. I swear it.”

“You have,” Anders says, and she feels him smiling against her skin. “Marian, love. I’m still _here_. Even after everything, you’ve kept me safe. With no hope, you kept me alive. You’ve proven everything.”

* * *

There are, of course, still things to do. Within a day, word reaches them that the Inquisition will be disbanding, due in part to pressure from Ferelden, and from the prickly presence of Bann Teagan instead of the King at the Exalted Council. It likely would have created an unrecoverable rift between the Inquisition’s supporters and the Ferelden crown, except that Elissa takes up letter writing immediately, cloistering herself away in Leliana’s old rookery, sending off missives in a stream. Letters pour in from Alistair and their advisors, apprising her of the situation, and she does what she has always done best: soothes nerves. Strengthens alliances. Reassures. She becomes queen again.

It takes a few days before she and Anders cross paths, but when it happens they both weep from happiness, from relief.

Elissa gives Anders the cure, and he cries even harder when he realizes what it is.

* * *

When Elissa is set to leave Skyhold, Marian lets Anders decide if he wants to go with her.

“I’ve made every decision for you for the past few years,” she points out, gentle but insistent. “It’s your turn. What do you want to do?”

He takes a long while to consider it.

“Elissa needs us more than Skyhold does,” he finally decides. “We could always wait until Evelyn returns, but…they’ll have enough to contend with. I don’t think there’s anything I can do for her arm, if the reports are to be believed, so a delay in seeing her wouldn’t do much harm. They’ll follow soon, won’t they?”

“She and Cullen will be venturing to Denerim after seeing things shut down here, yes,” Marian confirms, leaning back against the wall. “Elissa tells me there’s a lot of apologizing on behalf of Teagan to do, and that’s better done over a fancy dinner or twelve. And whatever Evelyn has decided to do about Solas is something that she apparently wants to discuss in person, in private. So… _that’s_ going to be great fun, I’m sure.”

Anders looks around his little room in the mage’s tower. It’s been the closest thing to a home he’s had since Kirkwall, since Marian’s estate.

“I can’t watch it end,” he admits. “I don’t want to. I think we should go to Denerim. I can thank Evelyn and Cullen when they get there.”

Marian smiles at Anders, and though she tries to keep her expression neutral, he can tell that she’s proud of him.

“I think that sounds like a fine choice,” she says. “I’ll tell Elissa.”

* * *

It is a hard few weeks on the road to Denerim. Elissa’s output of letter writing increases the closer she gets to home, and Anders and Marian filch her supplies to write their _own_ letters: Bethany, Varric, Aveline, Isabela, Fenris, Merrill. All of them have already been informed about Anders’ recovery, of course – Varric having the largest mouth in all of Thedas – but now that Marian is back, they have so much more to celebrate. Marian can imagine Bethany’s happy squeal, the faux-annoyed but secretly relieved grumble Fenris would likely give to a giddy Isabela. Aveline’s understated sigh of relief and Merrill’s breathy exclamations of delight. Varric, no doubt, will be writing back within five minutes of receiving Marian’s letter, inviting her to Kirkwall.

“Kirkwall,” she says to Anders later, after their letters are done. “Might not be a bad second stop.”

She’s half joking, and Anders seems to realize it, grinning, his back resting against the tree behind him, his hands busily brushing through the fur of Ser Scratch – the cat he chose to take with him from his litter in Skyhold (the rest having been left behind with a very passive aggressive letter of congratulations to Cullen, who will find himself the reluctant father of four affectionate cats when he returns).

“I just realized something,” he says, his voice tired. Sleepy, but serene, and something affectionate and _glad_ settles in Marian’s stomach to hear it. “We can go anywhere we like, love. I’m free.”

“Still wanted by the guard in Kirkwall, and probably the target of about a dozen assassins,” Elissa points out, looking up from her letter writing with a smile that speaks of fondness for her former Warden companion. “But yes, Anders. No one’s going to be dragging you back to a Circle again. How does that make you feel?”

Anders lets out a quiet little laugh, fingers burying in Ser Scratch’s fur. Marian has come to recognize the cat as a kind of totem for him. A security that he finds himself needing when his emotions get too strong. She settles in beside him, resting her head on his shoulder, and he lets out a contented sigh.

“Not sure words exist to describe how it makes me feel,” he admits quietly. “I’ll let you know when I think of anything other than _happy_.”

He laughs at the inadequacy of it, but it’s not the word that matters. It’s the tone, the wide, earnest eyes. It’s the way his lips twitch upwards a bit, and then afterwards twitch upwards even more, unable to stop himself from smiling wider, wider. It will take time for Marian to remember what it was like to live with Anders before he had his emotions stripped from him, back when she could glance at his face and read the lines and furrows and dark circles like they were script plastered across his features. But it’s easy to tell what he’s feeling, like a skill relearned easier than learning it the first time, and he’s right: there aren’t words enough. He reaches for Marian’s knee and squeezes it instead, and she turns her head, presses a kiss to his cheek. Elissa smiles and looks back down at her letter, her own gaze going dreamy and far off.

She likely would never admit it, but her pace increases noticeably the next day, and they make the remainder of the trip in half the expected time. They slip through the streets of Denerim like shadows, relying on Elissa’s years of rogue training to get them into the castle without being seen. Zevran meets them a quarter of the way to the castle, and Elissa reacts to his presence as if she expected it, though she had not mentioned it before.

“A surprise,” Zevran says simply, grinning. Wolflike. “He does not expect you for another week.”

“I like to keep him on his toes,” Elissa replies, and she can’t stop smiling.

* * *

In the end, all that effort in keeping unseen is wasted, because the moment they cross into the castle courtyard and see the king emerging from a door across the way, his tawny head bent over a letter as he argues with an aide, Elissa throws the hood off her cloak and calls his name.

In the two years they’ve been acquainted, traveling together, fighting side-by-side, Elissa Cousland has never seemed anything but a hyper-competent rogue to Marian. An equal, a partner, someone on whom Marian could rely completely.

And she’s a _girl_ , Marian realizes. A girl of a bit more than thirty, perhaps, but a decade is stripped from her as she runs, abandoning her pack, her steps light, her feet hardly touching the ground.

_I was nineteen when I met him_ , she had said one night, arms crossed over her chest as she stared up at the stars. _And my entire world had come apart. But he was there, doing everything he could to keep the pieces of it from drifting away, though he didn’t realize he was doing anything at all._

_Maker_ , she had also said. _But I loved him so much._

_Loved?_ Marian had asked, turning her head, taking in the stark profile of the queen, her long, regal nose and her eyelashes fluttering with a nearness to sleep.

_Loved. Love. Oh, I’ll never stop, but sometimes I wonder if it’ll be that simple. We’ve written nearly every day. The most ridiculous letters. Coded, you know. But Alistair’s codes are always…_ a laugh, and she had turned on her side, her gleaming eyes boring into Marian’s. _‘Help me, strong and noble knight, for I believe I have misplaced my favorite cheese knife’. He laughs at everything. Always has, and I…_ a surprising hiccupping sound, half a sob, and she had dashed the back of her hand against her eyes, wiping the tears with a fury that made Marian ache for her own lost love’s laugh. _I miss him so much. But I wonder if his jokes are hiding resentment. I left him alone to deal with a kingdom he never wanted. Will he even want me back? Will he even_ take _me back? What if I return to him, and he…and he…_

She never had finished the thought that night, and now she’s running, heedless of her own fears, and Alistair’s face is crumbling into a disbelief so open, so wide, so _brilliant_ that it’s no wonder that Elissa hardly even slows her pace to lessen the impact when she launches herself into his arms. It’s no wonder that she doesn’t question for even a single second longer whether he will welcome her.

He catches her, the letter forgotten, his aide squawking and ducking away as Alistair spins his wife in the air, lifting her up and then drawing her down again, his large hand spread over the back of her delicate neck, pulling her into a fierce kiss and laughing with triumph and giddy joy when he pulls away.

Impossibly young again, both of them, the years having melted away, and Marian can see the frightened teenagers, standing amidst the wreckage of Ostagar, can see the newly-crowned King Alistair, pale with the pressure of a nearly-ruined nation looking to him for strength, and the steady presence of his lady queen beside him.

More than a decade since they were those people, half of it spent apart, and yet they fit together again so effortlessly.

Time, Marian realizes suddenly, is nothing to a love that strong.

Anders’ hand presses into hers, his fingers finding her fingers, the gesture automatic. Relearned. Relearned every day for the rest of their lives, if they have to. Years together without really being together. Years after that apart. What is it, exactly, that she’s been so worried about? Of course the time doesn’t matter.

She tears her eyes away from Elissa and Alistair, and she gazes up at Anders instead. His newly healed forehead, the sunburst mark gone for good. His smile is _real_ , the lines at the corners of his eyes radiating outward. Deeper than they used to, and she wants to kiss every one of them. Wants to worship them for being there at all. Anders looks down at her, smiling even wider at the expression on her face, and she knows that he understands.

Time is _nothing_ to a love this strong.


End file.
